Responsible, meaningful content relevant to the Australian audience.

Web Content Writing

Writing for Websites is Different

Your work may require you to write for a website as well as for print on paper. In some ways writing for websites is not different from print. But the web is a different medium of transferring information and ideas and its users respond to it very differently from the way they respond to paper documents. For that case writing for the web requires more effort for the following reasons:

1. Web text is read slowly

Computer screen resolution is not as sharp as printed text on paper, so content is read more slowly than print.

2. Web text needs proofreading.

Web writers often miss typos or make grammatical mistakes in their own text. Website visitors are likely to spot these mistakes very quickly and gain a bad idea about your professionalism and attention to detail.

3. Website visitors are impatient.

Because it’s so easy to click from one site to another, visitors don’t stay on a site or scroll down a long text to look for what they want if it’s not obvious. They simply jump to another page.

4. Web sites attract different types of visitors.

Visitors may consist of users looking for concise, clear, and well mapped sites. Readers like researchers my want too much of information and may well prefer text adapted for screen display, such as that with lines running only halfway across the screen, and with blank lines between paragraphs. They may like to print out such documents and read them on paper. So they need documents that are well formatted when printed out. Others visitors may want to comment on what they find on your site, and perhaps create a link to it on their own sites. Viewers who want to look into graphics & sounds and listeners include persons with visual impairments who need text that is understandable when spoken by a voice program. Also visitors can be your colleagues trying to obtain your information through an intranet accessible only to employees. So, depending on the nature of your site, you should try to appeal to all types of visitors.

5. Web text is hypertext.

Visitors can jump from one page to another in any sequence they like. This means every document should be able to stand on its own, without reference to other documents.