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Writing for the web: it's just like print

Some years ago, it was quite common to see books and courses on how to ‘write for the web’. What they had in common was a tendency to emphasise the differences between reading from paper and reading from a screen. Even with a high-quality monitor, it continues to be much harder work to read from a screen than to read from paper.

Effective writing for the web must, first and foremost, be effective writing. That means content written with readers and their goals firmly at the centre of attention. An experienced editor, even one who has always worked on print material, will do this as a matter of course.

Web readers are impatient and task-focussed

Many people spend leisure time on the web being entertained – reading fan fiction or web comics, sharing videos and opinions on social networking sites, playing or discussing games.

However, the web is increasingly the way large numbers of people do business: they seek out information, pay bills, bank, get an education, interact with the government, shop, book travel and more. When they are doing these things, they're not generally interested in being entertained: they want to do something or learn something as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Perhaps the most dramatic difference between the online and offline worlds for many of these tasks is the easy availability of alternatives. If I'm looking for a camera in a real-world shop, I’ve invested time getting there and looking around; if I want to check the alternatives in another shop, I need to invest more time going there – perhaps even driving across town. To do that, I need to be convince that the alternative will offer a better range or better deal. By contrast, if the first camera shop's online, checking out the range in another shop is a matter of a few mouse clicks – I can even have multiple tabs open at once to make comparisons.

The implication for writers and editors: keep to the point!

Be brief

‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, and no simpler.’ (Albert Einstein)

Reading on screen is harder work than reading paper, which means that people are even more handicapped – and more irritated – by jargon and fluffy marketese. Many guides on writing for the web suggest that web content should be 20-25% shorter than the equivalent print content. My problem with this statement is that, if you turn it around, it implies that if you take a piece of content which has been written ‘for the web’, and re-work it for a print brochure, you should add 25-33% more words.

Compared with print, a website offers few constraints on wordiness: space is cheap. When you're writing for print, you need to bear in mind that an extra few words might mean an extra page – or an extra block of sixteen pages – which could add significantly to the cost of production. On the web, that limitation disappears, but if you don't remain disciplined, you run the risk of losing your readers' attention and damaging your site's reputation.

Your challenge is to identify key information and offer that first, then provide readers who want more detail with an easy way of getting it. Many news and catalogue sites use this approach: you need to understand your audience to get this right.

When you're writing for the web (or for print) make your content as simple as possible, then stop.

People don't read, they scan

It's often asserted that people scan web pages, rather then reading in detail. This is true but misleading, in that it’s presented as a key difference between the printed page and the screen.

People scan many web pages, but when they are doing equivalent tasks offline, they scan print too. If they're reading fan fiction on screen, they’re likely to read in much the same way they would read a short story or novel in print.

Readers looking for content of interest in a catalogue, a magazine, an encyclopaedia, a textbook, or the instructions for filling out a form will all scan for key words and (if available) images. This search will be easier if key words are in headings or in some other way stand out from the body of the text.

The conventions that help readers to scan were developed for newspapers – not the screen. These include brief paragraphs with clear topic sentences: avoid long blocks of text. Titles and headings should be meaningful and lead with the key words readers are likely to look for. Bulleted lists can help to break up the page, but only if what you’re writing is semantically a list: don’t force your message into lists because they ‘work’ on screen.

So shovelware's OK?

'Shovelware' is content written for print that's dumped on a website without any further editing.

Content that has been really well edited for print, that's consistent with your site's purpose and audience, can probably be shovelled onto your website without any great harm. However, there are important details you need to get right, and I'll address these in my next article.

Elizabeth Spiegel
February 2008

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