Web Writer and Web Writing: The New Craft
Web writing refers to all web-specific writing techniques.
Read a book, magazine, or newspaper is very different from reading a web page. The monitor is a rather tedious intermediate to use: tired of the eyes, gives an unnatural light and generates a lot of attention much more limited than what one can have with the printed paper. For this reason, it is important that anyone who is writing to the web should be careful not to make any mistakes that could run away from the user. There are so many small but precious rules for writing on the web and here I will try to expose some of them with the hope that all those who do this by profession or passion can be useful.
Writing for the web also means respecting the W3C standards, keeping in mind that writing for the web is not how to write a paper document: To increase the navigability and accessibility of content, you must learn to optimize the hypertexts.
Some studies conducted by Jakob Nielsen, a well-known Usability expert, have shown that web pages are not read from start to finish: content is “shaken” to search for what’s considered interesting. Anyone who makes web pages must work on hypertexts so they can easily understand the “at a glance” by breaking down many accessibility barriers.
The first thing to write good texts is the synthesis. Steve Krug, author of Dont ‘Make Me Think, recommends that you remove 50% of the words from a text to be published online and, after this first review, remove another 50% of the remaining words. The solution is drastic, but synthesis in the web is important because readers do not have time to waste. Simplicity is another element to consider: complex periods will be fatigued and, for users with cognitive disabilities, they may have considerable difficulties. Divide the text in short periods and simplify the display of each concept.