Writing for the web is a very different style of writing according to Chris Cree. He says it’s all about effective communication. I have to agree. Internet surfers have very short attention spans. Typically you will have 2 to 3 seconds to grab their attention, get them interested and engage them enough to want to read the rest of your article or web content. In the video Chris gives us 3 tips for better web writing.
You need to write in byte-sized chunks. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but most blog posts or articles are around 300 to 500 words max. If it’s more than that, the content needs to be really good to keep you reading. Think about it. When you are online, you read emails, blogs, and text from web pages. And it’s all in small, byte-sized pieces. If you watch videos on youtube, you’ll notice they are an average of 3 to 5 minutes in length. Too long, and we get bored.
Your web writing needs to be scannable. Most of us don’t even read stuff on the web, we quickly scan it, looking for anything to grab our interest and slow us down. If it doesn’t, we just keep on scanning. So, how do you make it scannable? Short paragraphs of 2 or 3 lines. Lots of bullets or lists. Headlines and subheads. All of these help to break up your article and make it easy to scan.
And last but not least you should have a conversational style to your website writing. Write the way you talk. If it’s not grammatically correct, don’t worry. Be casual with your writing. Believe me, it will be so much easier to read. If your writing is hard to read, it won’t get read. It’s as simple as that. Take a look at this article on how not to write for the web for an example of what I mean by writing that’s hard to read. I didn’t finish reading the excerpt, it was that bad.
Good website writing is easy if you follow these guidelines.
