Writing for the Web Takes Special skills That (Happily) Are Easy to Learn
by Tom Douglas

It was a dark and stormy …Click! That little noise you just heard was the sound of a Web surfer leaving your site for a more interesting one.

In writing for the Web, you have just milliseconds to snag a cyberspace reader’s attention. Flabby, boring copy just won’t cut it. There are 180 million websites out there so surfers don’t have the time or inclination to wade through an avalanche of verbiage.

Too many individuals and organizations treat their websites as information dumps – especially since cyberspace is free and there’s no printing bill to pay. But your time is worth something and you’re wasting it if no one is reading the material on your site. And, just like the boy who cried wolf, you ruin your chances of getting disillusioned surfers to revisit your site once you’ve lost them.

Well then, how do you attract and retain surfers so that they can absorb the information you’re trying to impart, leaving your site satisfied and ready to return when they’re in the market again for whatever you’re promoting?

To write winning websites, you should adopt the journalistic style known as the inverted pyramid. Experienced journalists realize that readers scan an article from the top down and want the most important information presented immediately. A well-written headline might be all the reader has time for, but if more information is desired, it should be obtainable in the first few paragraphs.

If readers have the time or interest, they will browse through the rest of the article right down to the final paragraph – which contains the least important nugget of information. Thus the term “inverted pyramid”. The vital facts are in the lead paragraphs (the base of the pyramid) and the material tapers down to the least important information (the tip of the pyramid).

When you were taught essay writing in high school, you learned to build up suspense, draw your reader into the story and conclude with a bang-up finish. Thus, if you were writing about a traffic accident essay-style, it might go something like this:

 “It was a dark and stormy night. Rain pelted the highway like spears of silver. Suddenly, the darkness was pierced by a slash of headlights racing from opposite directions. The squeal of brakes and sickly whine of skidding tires culminated in a horrendous crash of twisting metal. Then silence. Two dead bodies lay broken on the pavement.”

Try getting that purple prose past a crusty old editor looking for a succinct news story and you’d soon be lying broken on the pavement yourself – outside the newspaper office. Journalists using the inverted pyramid style of writing start the article by telling the reader the conclusion – cramming as many facts into the lead as possible. For instance:

“Two people were killed in a head-on collision Monday night at the Queen and East Street intersection.”

The reader may wish to read further to learn more details, but the basic facts are there in the opening paragraph.

Another thing to keep in mind when writing for the Web is that the vast majority of users don’t read web pages word-for-word, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. Jakob Nielsen, considered the Dean of Webmasters, claims that 79 percent of users always scan any new pages they come across and only 16 percent read word-by-word. He suggests that web pages have to employ scannable text, using:

Crawford Kilian, author of Writing for the Web (Writers' Edition) (Self Counsel Press),  suggests that, for ease of reading, a computer monitor should display the equivalent of only a third to a half page of double-spaced typescript (about 100 words). In “web-ese”, this is referred to as a “chunk”.

A short, informative headline and one chunk should contain all the information a user in a hurry needs to know. Hypertext links (underlined words or phrases that turn your mouse arrow into a tiny hand) lead the user to other pages if more information is sought. And the chunk should end with the hypertext link: Full Story to indicate that the entire text of the article is available if desired.

To illustrate, let’s take a well-known fairy tale and put it on our “website”:

Hungry Wolf Thwarted By Practical Pig’s Brick Home

The Big Bad Wolf, after a rampage that resulted in the destruction of two houses, one made of straw and the other of twigs, blew his brains out Thursday when his attempts to raze the brick home of Practical Pig proved unsuccessful. No matter how hard he huffed and puffed, the wolf was unable to dislodge Practical and his two brothers, who had taken refuge in the building. The house had been built to zoning standards set by council members of the Enchanted Forest...Full story

Space permits only a brief overview of proper web writing but this should be enough to get you started. Ideally, you should take a course in the subject, read a textbook or two and ask your favorite search engine to find you websites that give tips on this special style of writing.

Good luck – and may all your pyramids be inverted!

Copyright 2003 Tom Douglas

Tom Douglas, a media consultant, freelance journalist and webwriter, has conducted seminars on writing winning websites. Contact him at tgdouglas@sympatico.ca