The Do’s And Don’ts Of Writing For The Web | Arekibo Blog
By: Arekibo Communications
Tags: Audience, Writing For The Web, Accessibility, Content Strategy, Consistency

We previously discussed the importance of content strategy and tools to use for writing for the web, today we will discuss the do’s and don’ts for writing for the web.

Creating high quality website copy is a crucial step to producing a useful, usable and accessible website. Recently, we have been running a set of internal workshops to outline some key principles to adhere to when creating content for the web. The following list are some key principles for anyone who creates content online:

1. Audience

Understand your audience and craft the content that meets their needs. Once you understand your users, you can learn how to provide useful and meaningful content.

2. Scannable

Users don’t tend to read from left to right in a traditional way as if reading a book. In general, websites are scanned and scrolled. The first few seconds a user spends on a page are critical to engage and encourage the user to stay.

Visual elements help to ensure users can quickly scan the structure of the page and engage user.

Meaningful subheadings

Bullet lists

Short paragraphs and sentences

Use bold and italic sparingly

Suitable Imagery

3. Keep it simple

Ensure website copy is clear and easy to read. Compress the text into short sentences and paragraphs.

Clear and easy to read copy

Short concise sentences

Easy to understand

Avoid using jargon

Edit ruthlessly — Avoid ROT (redundant, outdated, trivial content)

The following tools provide feedback and a readability score based on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.

4. Consistency

Brand guidelines or style guide can help to enforce and maintain consistency. Tone of voice, terminology and writing styles are important to maintain consistency.

Ensure titles and headings stick to brand conventions.

Use title casing or sentence casing to reflect brand guidelines.

Ensure terminology is consistent throughout pages.

Do not refer to the user in both the second person and the first person within the same phrase.

5. Accessible

Ensure that header levels are not skipped in your document, and that bolded text or large font size is not used as a substitute for applying headers. In addition to the correct use of headers, it is good practice to use the following techniques:

Text alternatives (short, long, null)

Colour

Contrast (text, images)

Images of text

6. Interactive links

Interactive links will be a focal point for a user to quickly scan a webpage. Meaningful links will assist people with:

Improved scalability

Intuitive navigation of webpage

Create faster user journeys

Helps users with visual impairments to read the page

Do

Use descriptive action verbs for buttons and links.

Clearly indicate a links destination or function, out of context of the text surrounding it.

Links should be short, but descriptive.

Don’t

Don’t force your users to read all the surrounding words if you could convey the essential information in the link itself.

Avoid ‘click here’ type terminology — Do not use ‘click here’, ‘more’, ‘full information’, ‘pdf’, ‘file’, etc;

‘link to…’, ‘click to…’ etc. is unnecessary it should be obvious that a link is a link.

Don’t link whole paragraphs.

7. Use an active voice

An active voice creates a strong delivery of web content and provides the following benefits:

Authoritative voice

Easier to read

Use less words to get to a point faster

Writing for the web is different from writing for any other medium. The reader of your content is also the user of your website. This means she should be able to navigate through your content easily, which makes formatting of the titles, bullets, images and links especially important.

Content is an important part of any digital experience, alongside the design, user friendliness and security of the entire site. If you need help creating a sustainable content strategy or managing content for your web — contact us today.

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