Suppose you decide to create text specifically for the Web. Maybe you know what you should say, because the information is also available in print, but you're not going to revise a news release or report and then transcribe to the screen. You're starting from scratch. How do you go about it?
I usually try not to say what goes without saying, but consider your visitors and how you can serve them. "Serve" is the word, not "tell" or "sell" or "persuade" or even "inform." If your site can't help your visitors in some way that they value, your site has no reason to exist.
Scanning and Clustering
You will serve your visitors better if you remember that they read and navigate differently on screen than on paper. Studies by Jakob Nielsen and the Poynter Institute suggest that Web surfers tend to ignore graphics, and to scan text for guides to specific information. Surfers are impatient, unwilling to plow through masses of text to find a particular sentence or two. They want it short, obvious, and right now.
What's more, visitors won't always read sequentially, adding one idea to the foundation of the previous one. In hypertext, no idea is intrinsically "previous" or "subsequent." Instead it tends to stand alone in its own chunk of text, related to other chunks only as the visitor chooses to relate it.
This isn't quite as discouraging as it seems. The very process of putting together the site can suggest ways of organizing it. That process goes back to the old composition-course gimmick called "clustering."
The premise of clustering is that we think by free association, not in outline format. Instead of trying to force our thoughts into some kind of coherent sequence, we record them as they come to mind. Once they're on a piece of paper or a computer screen, those ideas suggest still more ideas. When we have a couple of dozen written down, we can start to cluster them by topic or theme.
Chunking or Scrolling?
Some ideas, of course, don't make the cut. Others may be so important that they make us reconsider the whole purpose of the site. Some idea clusters fit neatly into one chunk of text of not much more than 100 words. Others are too complex and diverse; they need to stand alone. What's more, they need lots of space and development. Chunking them would waste the visitor's time because they require patient, sequential reading.
Once we know what a given topic will be, we consider how it should link to other topics. The associations we first made, when clustering, may give us useful clues—if one idea instantly suggested another, the two may be naturally linked. (We'll test our own associations with those of others to see if we're right.)
The first assignment I usually give my Webwriting students is to write a thousand-word essay. The second assignment is to cut that first essay by 50 percent. We can do something similar: Write long, throwing in everything we think we need, and then go back through the text and cut without mercy. A hundred-word chunk will be much better at 50 words, or (if that's too concise) at 80. Even a scrolling text of a thousand words will serve readers better with a hundred surplus words lopped off.
Make Visitors Welcome
At whatever length, Webtext needs multiple headings and subheads. These are the navigation guides that visitors scan for, and they want lots of them. Links should be self-descriptive; even then, an evocative blurb will encourage visitor to jump through to the page. Within a chunk, text can still appear in two or three short paragraphs, at least one of which has a subhead.
Some visitors want to grab your information for their own projects. Others want to buy what you're selling, or just read your lovely prose for its own sake. Whatever their desires, you should make it easy to fulfill them.
Think about all the application manuals and user's guides you consulted, only to end up angry and frustrated. You can prevent that reaction in your visitors by putting yourself in their shoes. They want to know: "How can I—?" and you need to anticipate that question.
That need reflects one of the Web's sweetest ironies: Those who really succeed in this medium are not the techno-geeks but the people geeks, those who truly understand why people come to their sites, and give them what they came for.
the comments about writting for the web is useful,concise and accurate.
Posted by: christina | November 24, 2004 at 01:51 PM