By Ruben D. Canlas Jr.
When writing for intranets and websites, there are two important things to remember:
- Web pages and intranets are different from the print medium.
- You are also a web surfer -- observe your surfing habits and you'll learn a lot.
Web surfers scan, not read.
As usability guru Jakob Nielsen says, web readers don't read. They scan. They don't read a page word for word. Instead, their attention jumps, from one spot to another on the page. The hot spots (the places they first scan) are usually photos and highlighted words. Why? That's our next point.
They scan for meaningful or interesting information.
Think of web surfing as an investment in time. When you surf the web, you don't want to waste time, so you try to judge the relevance of a web page by scanning for relevant items. If you don't find anything useful, you close the page and go somewhere else. This is the clincher: when you write a web page, you should provide cues to the web surfer so that they may make the right judgement on your page.
- Provide summaries at the top of the page, or in a prominent location, distilling your whole page in 1-3 sentences.
- Make your paragraphs simple and put only one idea per paragraph.
- Use subheadings that make sense. For example, I could have used "Read again" as a subheading, above, instead of "Web surfers scan, not read". But the first option would be more vague.
- Prefer bulleted lists. They distill ideas and impart them quickly.
- When making links, provide cues so that web surfers don't have to click to see what's in that link. Example, instead of just saying "click here", you can try "Read more about usability". It's such a pain to click a link only to find out that it's not relevant to you.
Please also read good tips on web writing.
