Sally Jacobs published a great article in Web Design Ledger offering some tips and tricks to web publishers when writing copy for his or her website.
According to Jacobs,
…the success of website writing depends primarily on conciseness, scan-ability and objectivity. But these aren’t the only guidelines to follow to make your writing successful on the web.
The article discusses the basics such as writing in the active voice, clearly and concisely, and how we need to chunk our content to increase “scanability”, and how to hook our readers–a great primer for new writers to the web.
The article continues to discuss some of the more interesting emerging trends such as SEO and using keyword analysis and tools to augment the writers’ gut instincts. Other ideas are the judicious use of hyperlinking to prevent writers from educating users on what they already know, to the use of multimedia–finding the balance between cool and overwhelming!
I found this article to be a nice refresher on writing for the web, along with some ideas of how to work at informing and educating users without overwhelming them. (Although I’m surprised the author didn’t talk about tooltips for definitions!)
This edited post was first published on the MIT WebPub blog on July 20, 2010.