Writing for the Web

Writing for the Web

Writing new material for the web is one of the important for developing a website. Writing for web is totally different from the writing that we all are already done for our courses like on handouts and other instructional material. Reading on web is tend to scan the text online and reading text while offline. When we read over the web we do not read the blocks of text from start to the finish. Instead, they can scan a relevant material on the site and then print the pages which contains a relevant material which the seeker is finding. Once we apply the method and style for the web document that accommodate this type of reading.

Writing Style

The writing style for the web document is totally different from the style of writing that we used in the documents. The main task in the web writing style is to write in the language and style of the reader to read it. You can not write your message so deeply that the web reader scanning your pages either skip it or don’t bother to find it. In writing, Summarization is the main approach for the web reader to find you information. You have to write main points of your documents in the first half or paragraph of the writing. So, the reader when scan your document can not miss the main points of the page. Mostly, the readers scan the relevant material from the pafe rather than reading the whole page of document word to word.

Be Succinct

Reading from the computer screen is slower than the reading from the paper. It’s a human fact that they feel unpleasant when they reading text online than the reading from the paper. In short, peoples don’t want to read a lot of text on the computer screen because read on the computer screen is difficult than the reading from the paper. To solve a problem we should have to write 50% less text that we would have used in the hardcopy. It’s not a matter of reading speed but also a matter of feeling good when you are reading anything. Moreover, we also know that the peoples don’t like to scroll down the mouse that’s the another one more reason to keep pages short.

The screen readability problem will be solved in the future, since high resolution screens have been invented and it has the high resolution of 300dpi. It also found that these high resolution screens have good readability as compare to the paper.

Scannability

As we know that reading on the computer screen is painful than reading on the paper because of the online experience seems to be feeling impatience sometimes. That’s why, the users are not read blocks full of text over the computer screen. Instead, users scan the text and pick out the text which he like to be reading and skipping over those blocks of text that they care less. The text that they pick out it may be keywords, sentences, paragraphs according to the interest of the user.
One of the fact of the Web is Skimming instead of reading. It has been confirmed by the more of the usability of the studies. Web writers also acknowledge this fact and write something important for the scannability.

a) Structure articles with two or three levels of headlines.
b) Use easy and meaningful headlines.
c) Use bold and underline text for the important words so that user’s eye catch it easily. Colored text can also be used for the important words.

Hypertext Structure

Making text material short. Don’t need to search deeply and write it. Use the hypertext links to arrange the information up into the multiple nodes. Long and detailed information can be available on the secondary pages and which is available through the links for those readers who wants the detailed summary of the document which they can searching.
Hypertext should not be used for the long blocks of text of story into multiple pages. Its very difficult to download all the text and it creates problem in the printing also. While download all the blocks of text it decreases the reading accuracy. Proper hypertext structure is not a single flow. Instead of making blocks of text, split the information in different paragraphs so that each paragraph focus on a certain topic. There is some guidelines which help the reader to search that what he wants to search and download the information. Each hypertext page contains a short conclusion, the reader finds the material what he wants without reading the page word by word.