The “you” attitude
Web Writing should present facts and ideas in terms of the reader’s advantage. So be sure to talk more about your reader than about yourself. Instead of writing.
I’ve listed the top 15 companies I consider a treat to the environment—you can write:
You can email your protest to the top 15 environmental polluters.
This is more than simple courtesy. Your readers have their own purposes for coming to your site, and you are there to serve those purposes. If you understand what you readers want and you anticipate their needs, your site will succeed and your readers will return.
Consideration is an important part of the nonverbal message that conveys the “you” attitude. Your readers are doing you a favor by visiting your site, and you owe them a rewarding experience. Will they stick around for that killer graphic to download if they’ve only got a 14.4 Kbps modem? Will they really want to scroll through your list of the 100 worst movies of all time? Will they follow one of your links to a File not Found message? An out -of –date site with “link rot”(links that nowhere) wastes readers’ time.
So put yourself in your readers’ shoes: If you were a stranger arriving at you own site, would you feel as if the site’s creator had made a special effort to make life easy for you?
If we accept these three principles of the Webwriting, several useful guidelines for structuring content emerge from them. These are discussed in detail in the next chapter.
ORGANIZING WEBSITE CONTENT
Orientation: Navigation Cues
Provide readers with a site overview
Robert E Horn, in his book Mapping hypertext, points out that linear text is full of cues that help the reader navigate. Organization of print text is hierarchical, for example. We expect each section to include some general statement or thesis, supported by various kind of evidence or illustration. We start a book with an overview or introduction that summarizes important points, and we often find that chapters of the book feature similar introduction. In hypertext, says Horn, we need to present the whole hierarchy of the text in some kind of overview, such as a navigation bar whose buttons will take us to different section within the text.
Your front page may include a big headline and summary about the purpose of the site, but it should essentially be a table of contents. You can organize your hypertext in a number of ways, including—-
• alphabetically,
• numerically,
• chronologically,
• graphically, or
• completely at random (which I don’t recommend)
A list of employees’ telephone numbers and email addresses would naturally be alphabetical —- probably just a string of letter- links ( A, B, C , etc.) across the screen. So would you a list of department within your organization. A sequence describing a process in the time might be a numbered list; so might a categorical list of topics running from most important to least important.
Many website use graphical contents pages .These can range from something as an organization chart to an elaborate map full of graphic cues: a cartoon of a policeman in a kiosk, for example, linking to the name and telephone number of the company’s security officer. Be careful when using graphical cues in the place of textual ones as many new Web users may not organize the cartoon of link, which will defeat its purpose.
If you’re confident that your graphics are intuitive and self-explanatory to anyone from any cultural or educational background, you don’t have to worry about refining the text on your contents page. Otherwise, you should try to make your text as clear possible, even if it seems redundant to those who do understand the graphics.
A pop song of yesteryear might be the anthem of Webwriters: “Shut the door, they’re coming the window.” Web suffers can directly access just about any page on site that doesn’t require the password. You can create a detailed, well- organize front page with a clear statement of your site‘s purpose and good table of contents, but if I ask a search engine to find pages that mention snowboarding, and one of your other pages features the word “snowboarding,“ I will go to that page without ever seeing the rest of your site, let alone your front page. I won’t even know much about your site unless you give me information and navigation aids on your snowboarding page.
Every page on your site should at least have link to your front page or display a table of contents, so your readers who have entered your site “through the window “ will at least know where they are and what else your site as to offer. The terms your use in the table of contents should be identical to the headings you have use in the text. Your readers want to find their way around your site with the least possible hassle. If each page has consistent, clear navigation guides, readers will be grateful.
Many site are now offering not only a table of contents, but an index page that provides a direct link to each individual page on the site. An index page may not have room for blurbs, but it’s a good idea to group page into section. So if your Website on the town of Chesterton has a page for each hotel in Chesterton, list those pages in the index under a section on logging —- not in alphabetical order by hotel name interspersed with all the other index entries.
You many want to create a “frames “ page, in which screen is subdivided into two or more windows. One window may offer your table of contents as a list of links; click on link and it displays in the main window. The advantage of this is that your table of contents is always visible and readers don’t have to scroll to the top or bottom of your site to access it. Many dislike frames, however, or still don’t have browsers that can display them. Some people also are unable to print hard copies of frames pages. You can still provide some basic links on each page by creating a page template with those link built in. (Most Web authoring programs will let you create frame sand templates when you start to create pages.)
Signal transitions with navigation buttons
In print text, paragraph indentions signal new topics or subtopics, punctuation marks define relationships between words and phrases, and transition words and phrases ( e.g., Meanwhile, Secondly, Nevertheless, A day later, another arguments) let readers know how each paragraph connects to the previous one. In hypertext, such transitions are generally meaningless because readers may jump from section in various sequences.
Linear text often prepares us for sequence
Your journey to Mexico will include stays in Cuernavaca,
Puebla, and Acapulco.
When we read sentences like this one, we expect description of each Mexican city. Hypertext can prepare us for such sequences only by some cue outside the sequence, such as navigation buttons labeled Cuernavaca, Puebla, and Acspulco.
Your front page may include not only links to section of the site but also links to different passages within a single page — especially if it’s along, scrolling page. This allows readers to skip up and down the page to the paragraphs they’re most interested in.
Be careful about the directional terms you use to label your navigation buttons since you readers aren’t all arriving at your site via your front page. If readers arrive via Alta Vista, Hotbot, or same other search engine, and land on your Puebla page, a navigation links that says back to home page doesn’t make much sense. How can they go “back to“ to some place they’ve never been? Why have the button that says next if the page it links to has nothing to do with Puebla? It would be better to create navigation links that say to Mexico Home Page or to Acapulco page.
If you are working with long, scrolling documents, at the bottom of the page, and perhaps at intermediate stages:
To Top of Financial Aid Pages
To Chesterton Collage Policies Page
To Chesterton Collage Home Page
Your readers may bring some print-media habits with them. If so, they’ll assume that any items listed near the top of the Web page are either introductory material or the most important material on the page .They may also scan from lift to right and then pay most attention to whatever is in the upper right hand corner— very much as we do when we scan a newspaper’s front page. If you would rather direct readers to same other part of the page, you may need to spell out your preferred sequence: Read may first, Introduction, If you’re New to this Site …, or some such cue.
Orientation: Headlines
Headlines can include the title of your site, the titles of individual page, and subheadings that break up text. Like the thesis sentence of a paragraph, headlines tell readers what to expect, so they deserve some thought before you write them.
Ideally, the title of your site should tell readers what it’s about: In Praise of Holly Cole, or your Guide to Chesterton. Many of your readers will find you through a search engine that gives them the site title and the first few words of text. If you title is Paradise! And your introductory text is “ here is the land the conquistadors sought…,” readers searching for Chesterton may not realize this is the site they’ve been looking for .
If you’re skilled in HTML, you can write a meta-tag that some search engines will display instead of the first few words on page. A keyword meta-tag lists words and phrases that searches might use: skiing, snowboarding, winter sports, hiking, alpine environment, recreation. Some sites load such keywords ( invisibly ) onto their front page so that search engines will display the sites in the first batch of “ hits “ the engines turn up. Many search engines, however , will reject sites with lists of meta-tags; if they find the word “skiing “ repeat ten times in a invisible meta-tag, the engines recognize that this is an attempt to get the site to the top of the list of hits, and will not display the site.
If you don’t know how to create meta-tags, don’t worry. Just make sure the keywords that readers are likely to search for are in your title and first few lines of text. Search engines will usually include those lines in their lists of hits. If the first text on your site is just the titles of your navigation buttons—Home, News Releases, President’s message— readers won’t have much sense of what’s really on your site, so they may not take a chance on visiting it.
How you display your title headline is also important. If you’ve turned it into a huge graphic that takes a long time to download, some impatient visitors may leave before they see it. Others will wait, only to be disappointed that it’s just your company logo, or a photograph of you with your name in 3D letters. Better to keep your title as regular text, in a legible font.
Keep your headlines close to the text they introduce. Usually, headlines, should be just one double space from the first line of regular text that follows.
Uses Subheads
Subheads can greatly help your readers. If you’re writing and organizing your text screen-size chunks, subheads will prepare readers for the content that is to appear in the following chunk. You may even find that a single chunk of 100 words can still benefit from two or three subheads.
If you’re providing long, scrolling text, subheads will help to break it up into manageable length. If the documents is over 1,000 words long, break it up with subheads, and create links to chose subheads at the top of the page:
Financial Aid and Awards
General Information Services of the Publications Financial Aid Office
Scholastic Awards Deadlines for Emergency Founding Applications
Your readers now have the choice of scrolling through the whole section, or jumping to partic8ular sections of interest.
Hook readers’ interest:
Hooks, links, and blurbs
For a word less than 100 years old, “blurb” has gone through some remarkable changes in meaning.
American humorist Gelett Burgess coined the term in 1970.he sketched a voluptuous blonde as covered art for a book jacket, and named her “Miss Blinda Blurb.” For some time, sexy cover art was a blurb, but the word also came to many overdone praise of a book appearing on the jacket.
While that’s still and accepted meaning, the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s picked it up in a different sense—the brief summary of story appearing between the title and the text. Its purpose was to tempt readers into investing the time to read the story.
On the Web, we now use “blurb” to mean a notice about what to expect on the other side of the link. Like the pulp magazines, we want our readers to make that jump and invest some time in our text. They’re more likely to if they have a sense of what they‘re getting themselves into. Without that sense, they me be reluctant to wonder into the labyrinth. In effect we haven’t given them adequate orientation for our site.
A good link should have two parts, though they may appear in single word or phase: a hook and a blurb. The hook—a term borrowed from magazine writing – is something at the beginning of the text that grabs reader attention. In our case, the hook is usually the text of the link itself: Best Snowboarding in Colorado, or Typical House Prices in Lynn Valley. If you think that’s enough to draw readers through the link, then fine. Bear in mind that you have a wide range of hooking devices to choose from:
• Quotation Marks. “We love to read text that someone is supposed to have actually
spoken,“ says Crawford Kilian.
• Question. A question promise an answer, and we’ll jump though the link of find it.
• Unusual statement. Anything surprising will give the reader a jolt and wonder what
other bizarre things you may have to say.
• Comparison / contrast. Comparisons show how things are similar contrast show how
they differ.
• News peg. A tie-in with some big current event can draw interest ( but don’t let the
news peg go stale on you.
• Promise of conflict. An attack or refutation makes us want to read more.
• Direct address. Web writing needs “you “ attitude, so talk right to the reader.
These hooks may stand on their own, but sometimes you’re trapped the with text that may be confusing or ambiguous. It teach in a communications department, and I get a lot of mail intended for our public- relations people (who work in what’s called “college relations”). What if you’re trying to show the different between your company’s Information Systems department and your Information Services department? That’s where a blurb comes in handy:
Information System
Computer support, Webmaster, staff training.
Information services.
Public relations, technical editing, company newsletter advertising purchases.
Even if your text link seems self—explanatory, a blurb may make it more inviting. Maybe your text links is What makes a good business plan? The implied promise of the answer becomes more explicit with a blurb like:“ Six successful entrepreneurs offer practical advice.
Whatever hook you use, make sure it’s Appropriate. A promise of conflict, for example, had better deliver the conflict.
You can also make life easier for your readers by turning both hook and blurb into links. Supposed you have a link to Company Personnel Policies. Make the jump and you find yourself on page full of still more links. Give readers the change to go directly to the policy they want:
Company Personnel Policies.
Policies dealing with Hiring, Probationary Period, Employee Evaluation Procedures, Health & Safety Issues, Conflict Resolution, Salary Scale, etc.
If you screen space permits, you can break the blurb into a bulleted list or columns; the point is still to guide readers where they want to go, as quickly and conveniently as possible.
Fight the urge to turn the blurb into a mini-essay of its own. The blurb should always be the least you can possibly do. If the word, phrase, or sentence enables readers to use the link confidently, it’s done its job.
The blurb might also indicate whether the text on the other side is an archive (a text originally written for print on paper) or a chunk (a text of no more than 80or 100 words designed for “ hit and run” reading). Many news site do this when they display a headline and the first paragraph of a story, with (full story) at the end. You might do this with your company’s annual report, with a summary in chunk from and the blurb Full Text in PDF and Full the Text in HTML as links.
With a link to chunked test, the blurb can simply make the link more explicit (again guiding readers where they want to go):
Student Tuition Fees.
Fees for the 2000-2001 academic year of resident and international students.
Whatever page your readers land on, they should have the opportunity to respond to what they find —and to you. An email link may seem self-evident, but it might get more traffic with a blurb:
ckilian@thehub.capcollege.bc.ca
I’d love to hear your opinion of this advice!
Information
Analyze your audience.
How do you structure your site and what content you create should reflect the readers you want to attract to your site, and why. Are you looking for costumers, converts, students, employers, kindred spirits? Are they experienced in using the Web, or complete novices? Do they speak English? Do they read it?
In some cases, you can draw a detailed demographic analysis based on careful research: maybe you’re trying to sell package tours to singles aged 18 to 34, or providing medical advice for parents of children with cystic fibrosis, or celebrating a pop singer who appeals to girls aged 13 to 17. Much of want you have to say—in both content and style—should reflect what you know about that readership.
In other cases, your subject will cross boundaries of age, gender, and nationality. Your audience will care about the research you’ve put in the subject, but it would be impossible to the similar research into the audience itself. This is where research yields to soul search: you have to ask your self what other fans of Holly Cole would really like to find on your sit, or what information would excite potential applicants to your college’s computer- animation program.
Whatever decisions you make about the nature of your desired audience, don’t forget that many in that target group simply don’t have access to the Web, or don’t even know about your site. Meanwhile, many other people who are not among your desired audience may turn up out of curiosity or by accident. Presumably you want them to leave with a good impression of you your organization, and you intended audience, even if they’re not especially interested in the subject of your site. So even if your site is highly specialized it should offer something to the casual visitor.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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