Organize Consciously
Don’t throw material into site at random, just because it’s hypertext.
You don’t have several possible ways to organize your content.
Narrative order
Narrative order involves describing a process through the time. If it’s a fairly extended narrative (e.g., My Six Months Backpacking Through Africa ) You might as well make it s single long document and treat it as a down-loadable archive. If it’s short narrative, or breaks logically into subsection, it might work better in chunks. For example, if you’re describing the process of home brewing, each stage might get its own page. Readers can go to the page they’re interested in without having to scroll through material they don’t want. However, readers may want to print out the text explaining the whole process, so you could make it available as a single document elsewhere on your site. ( Be sure to let readers know that it’s available.)
Logical order
When you present text in logical order, you make an assertion, you bring in your documentation to back it up, and you came to a conclusion. This may get long- winded, so your arguments are likely to end up at archive length rather than in short, powerful chunks.
If you’re really familiar with the Web, you may be tempted to simply mention your sources and turn them into links:
A famous American scientist, Linus Pauling, started the modern craze for vitamin C as a cure-all.
If you do this, however, your readers may surf away to the Linus Pauling Home Page and may not return to your site. A more useful approach for cutting sources is to put your links to sources at the end of your argument. That way, readers will finish reading your argument and then visit your sources if they are interested.
Categorical order
Hypertext comes into its own when text is organized in categorical order. You have a subject that breaks more or less obviously into chunks, with no particular reason to list chunks in a specific order. To spare your readers from navigation problems and information overload, you have to impose some kind of order on your categorical material. Maybe your site has a page with links of five order page describing the five the five most popular trails in your regional park. You could list them from shortest to longest ( or vice versa ), from north to south, from easiest hardest, even in alphabetical order. The blurb on the front page could indicate how you’ve organize them, from shortest to longest, for example:
Alpine Meadows Trail. 6 km. Really steep, but what views!
High Corniche Trail. 18 km. For experienced hikers only.
Readers will simply use your blurb as a guide to the trails that most interest them.
If you’re simply transferring document (like a company report or a park brochure) to a Website, imposing categorical order on you material will not be an issue. But if you’re generating your own text, you may feel baffled trying to sort it all out. You want to present coherent, easy-to-follow text, but your mind operates like simmering minestrone soap: ideas float to the surface, then sink again. Try to force organization on your own thought, and your get the cerebral equivalents of a system crash.
Clustering is one effective way to begin ordering your material. It’s simple process for out writing yourself. Let the ideas of possible topics to include on your Website come into your head in whatever order they like and jot them down as they occur to you. One idea inspires another; write that down too. Eventually you have several sheets of paper (or a computer screen) covered with ideas is no particular sequence.
Now that those ideas are out f your head, you can look at them and see which belong with which. Some are clearly introductory; other deal with main subject; still others are part of the conclusion. Cluster these ideas by tagging all the introductory items with a #1 or an A. The central ideas could be tagged #2, #3, #4, or B, C, D; the concluding ideas, #5 or E. If you’re doing this exercise with one of the newer word processor’s outlining function, and before you know it you’re organized.
Suppose you’re putting together the Website for Chesterton, a year round sports and sightseeing destination. You might start jotting down ideas something like this.
History, skiing, snowboarding, zinc mine, logging, motels, hotels, youth hostels, regional parks, shopping, wildlife, environmental problems, swimming, waterskiing, hiking trails, entertainment, restaurants.
Obviously, some ideas inspired related ones, but most topics just occurred to your more or less at random. You see more obvious categories: Winter Sports, Summer Sports, Lodging. In the Winter Sports category, you could put skiing and snowboarding –and, come to think of it, you can also put in something about snowshoeing and ice skating.
Later on, you may want a separate page for Winter Sports, or you may decide to lump them in with other activities in a Year-Round Sports section.
Clustering works for almost any kind of writing task, an in Webwriting it also suggest how you might design your navigation system. Maybe each section of your text will have its own navigation button on your front page. Or, if you’re creating a long, scrolling page, a contents list at the top of the page could provide links to each section.
Style and Display
You should be generating your Webtext in whatever front and size are comfortable for you. You know that your readers may have set their machines to display some other default front, in some other size, and you can’t control that. You also know that PCs and Macs may display your site somewhat differently. But do you can ensure that your readers at least come close to seeing your text as you wish them to.
First, bear in mind that a serif front, like the one used in the main text of this book, is usually easier to read in extended text than a sans serif front, like the one used for headings throughout this book. So if you have long passages of text, a serif front is your best bet. Point size makes a different too. Usually, type should appear at no smaller than 10 points no longer than 14 points. Readers with poor eyesight especially will prefer longer point size.
Stick with plain text. Use capital letters, small caps, italics, and boldface sparingly. The purpose of these special displays is to emphasize something; the more displays you use, the less emphasis anything will get. A whole paragraph in italics or small caps or regular caps will be difficult to read. Combining special displays only makes matter worse. A headline in BOLD ITALIC CAPS is overkill. If you must use all-uppercase letters, scale down the point size a little. And don’t even think about underlining for emphasis; on the We, an underline means a link.
Remember that a front like Georgia in 12- point is great for reading on a monitor but may be awkward as a printer front. For example, a table may not print completely because 12-point Georgia makes the table too big to fit on a letter-sized page.
A Web author can specify a particular front and size right in the HMTL code of the site. As long as the front is one that readers have on their computers, the site will appear more or less as the author wants it to. But if the front isn’t there, the reader’s default front will take over anyway- perhaps with disastrous results for display and readability. You probably leave decisions about display up to your readers.
Be very careful about mixing colors. If choose a back background and then display text in the dark blue, you are going to make your site unreadable. The same is true of lights colors, such a yellow text on a pale- green background. Good old black text on a write page should serve you well for most purposes. Your Web authoring program will usually let you specify the colors you want for your text and background.
Unless you intend your archive material to be printed out rather than read off the screen, try to avoid running text the full width of the monitor. A column about half the width of the screen is much easier to read because no line will be much more than ten words long. Any longer, and readers will have trouble finding the beginning of the next line.
Formatting for printing
Bear in mind that your readers may want to use your text both on-screen and on paper. Anyone who has tried printing from the screen, however, finds that not all documents look the same on paper. If you intend or expect your text to be used in both media, you can make readers’ lives easier by avoiding certain practices:
• A wide multicolumned table can pack a lot of information into a single
screen, but the reader’s printer may not pick up the whole table
(especially if the browsers is set to display a big screen front and the
reader hasn’t remembered to switch to a printer front)
• Sidebars and frames con look ghastly and make the text almost
unusable; readers eventually learn the command “print frame” but why
force them to if you can avoid it?
• Hyphenated words can make your screen text look tidy, but the hyphens
may carry over into reformatted print text, where they become needless
errors. The solution in most cases is simply to use a ragged-right margin
with no hyphenations at all.
• Page number references usually become meaningless once a Web page
is printed out, as do navigation cues such as Next and Back.
When you are organizing your information and text, keep your readers in mind. If you know your site will get mostly hit and run readers, your page have to display concise chunks of text. If you’re planning a “library“ of long documents for readers looking for detailed information, then you won’t have to edit yourself quite has harshly. You will also to consider how you want readers to respond to a particular item: with a click to some other chunk, or with an email answer? And will they get a suitable reward for their trouble? Webwriting, like chess, means you have to think several moves ahead — and put yourself in your readers’ shoes.
Use bulleted list
As readers, we’re used to sentence on paper with long list of noun, verb, and phrases. On the monitor such sentence become harder to read — and harder to respond to. This can be a problem in an interactive medium such as the verb.
Compare the following paragraph, taken from the next chapter, with its bullet form.
The media have given us some of their own occupational slang “like sound bite,“ but trendy clichés usually come from the occupation and profession most interesting to the chattering classes. So business has given us bottom lines, deep pockets, and downsizing. Te military has given us bite the bullet, in the trenches, breakthrough, and flack. Engineering gives us parameters, state of the art, leading edge, and reinventing the wheel. Athletics gives us team players, ballpark figures, level playing fields, and tract records. Politics is the home of charisma, spin doctors, bandwagons, and momentum. The self-help movement takes us from the trendy clichés to want many consider outright psychobabble: self-actualizing, holistic, meaningful, one day at a time, and wellness.
The media have given us some of their own occupational slang, like “sound bite “ but trendy clichés usually come from the occupations and professions most studied by the chattering classes:
• Business: bottom lines: deep pockets, downsizing
• Military: bite the bullet, in the trenches, breakthrough, flak
• Engineering: parameters, state of the art, leading edge, reinventing the wheel
• Athletics: team players, ballpark figures, level playing fields, tract records
• Politics: charisma, spin doctors, bandwagons, momentum
• Self-help: movement: self- actualizing, holistic, meaningful, one day at a time,
wellness
Bulleted lists offer a couple of other advantages: You don’t have to keep finding different ways to say the same thing (business has given us, The military has given us, Athletics, given us), and it’s easier to sound objective. In a bulleted list, my snide remark about “psychobabble” in the self-help movement has no place.
Bulleted lists might introduce a longer discussion of the topics mentioned, or might provide links to other site dealing with the topics.
Action
Communication runs both ways
Fifty year ago, electronics engineers developed models of communication using “postal” and “projectile” metaphors: The message was like a package that most be delivered intact (In 1999, FedEx commercials featured a horseman carrying a parcel through rivers and past gunmen, and triumphantly delivering it to a pioneer family.) The models assumes that the receiver understands the message and can accept and interpret it as easily- and passively- as your computer downloads a file.
These metaphors are unfortunately still common in business and education. Teachers still “deliver” courses like a much junk mail, while politicians and businesses “target” voters and consumers with message that “get through” like amore-piercing bullets. Government launch cruise missiles at other governments to “send a message” The basic premise is that communication is a monologue, valuable only the extent that it creates the desired effect . Such models have been called “instrumental” sense they treat communication as a tool for manipulating a passive receiver.
More sophisticated models treat communication not as one-way missile launched at a passive target, but us a simultaneous two-way process in which participants constantly change their message as they see how other participants are responding. This is the “inter’ in “Interactivity” Such models are called “constructive” because participants are actually creating meaning out of their exchange.
If you design your Website as a missile-launching platform aimed at passive readers, you’re missing the whole point of the Web. No matter what you put on your site it’s worthless until readers arrive, construe your meaning, and act on your information (assuming you’ve made it possible for them to act) Your readers, not you, will decide what your site really means and what value it has. You in turn have to respond to what your readers tell you, and before you know it, you’re engaged in a conversation. If you listen to them and respond by adapting your content, you too are being interactive.
If you don’t listen and don’t adapt, your site is just a waste of time and bandwidth.
Response cues
Since the Web is supposed to be an interactive medium, your readers should respond to the information you provide with more than “So what?” You want then to take action.
Often, the only action needed for readers is to follow a link to another page, so the only response cue you need to provide is a clear link title and perhaps a blurb. But you may also want a more specific response: an email message, the submission of a form, a purchase order
As marketers in the print media know, many people are slow and reluctant to respond on paper: they have to find the pen, and then an envelope, and then a stamp, and then they have to go out in the rain and mail their response. This is why so many companies provide stamped envelopes and some kind of bribe or treat—all simply to prod costumers to respond.
Response is far easier on the Web. Click on an email address and email form pops up; just type in a few words, click on the Send button, and you’re done. If typing is to much trouble, just reply to questions by clicking on the buttons of a form. Worried about transmitting your credit card number over the Web? Just provide your telephone number, and organization you want to order from will call you.
Easy a response may be, most Web users still don’t response—especially if it means spending money. We’ll look at marketing in more detail in Chapter 8, but for now, let’s just put ourselves in the readers’ shoes. What’s in it for them if they email you, fill out you form, join your list-serv, or answer you questionnaire? Presumably there’s some sort of reward, a benefit or pleasure they would otherwise miss out on. And they have to know they’ll miss it!
So invite your readers to act in their own interest:
Just fill out this form to make sure you get regular updates on Holly Cole’s concert tour – plus a chance to win copy of her latest CD!
To reserve you beautiful room a Chesterton Loge — at 10 percent of seasons rates — just send us your telephone number and we’ll call right back to get your credit –card number and confirm your reservation.
If you want current news about the market for romances, you’ll beg glad you joined HEARTMART-L, the listserv for professional and aspiring romance novelists. All you need to do is send us an email, and marker news and tips will start arriving within hours!
Do your symptoms, point to a yeast infection as the cause of your feeling ill? Take this quick quiz simply by clicking on the Yes or No buttons after each question.
You can make a different! Let your government representatives know that you think by adding your name to our email protest. They’ll know in minutes that you’re angry and you want results!
Notice that each invitation tries to make action sound effortless: Just fill out this form, All you need to do, They’ll know in minutes. The action needed is built right into the appeal through a link to the suitable form. The Web is a culture of impatience, so effective appeals offer quick and painless ways to respond.
Reviewing a Website
We usually understand a problem better( and find solution faster )when we can discuss it in detail. If you look your Webtext in progress and all you can say is “This sucks” you’re not likely to improve it until you can identify the problem.
Reviewing someone else’s site can help. The purpose of a Web site review to enable you can identify the key elements of a site (both concept and execution) and, thereby, to identify what may help or hurt your own site.
You may prefer to judge sites by the criteria discussed in:
• Jutta Degener’s Dangerous Words:
http://kbs.tu-belin.de/%7Ejutta/ ht/ writing/ words.html
• Web Pages that Suck:<http:// webpagesthatsuck.com>
• Worst of the Web:http://www.worstoftheweb.com/
Or you many want to develop your own criteria; if so, they may include some or all of the following:
• Purpose. Entertainment, marketing, information, or education? Is the purpose
achieved? How? If not, why not—has the author misjudged the audience or
misunderstood the nature and conventions of the Web?`
• Audience. Novice or experienced? Young or old? Male or Female?
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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