A Quick Guide to Web Writing

This book gives you quick tips about how to cater to specific audience, how to make sure that your content is the attention grabber, and to get good search engine rankings for your web page.

You will learn about the:
* Importance of hyperlinks
* Technicalities of style guide
* Style rules for visual design and layout
* And lots more…

Your audience makes first impression when they view your web page layout. Read what the author has to say about layout: Let’s recognise it—writers are basically text-writing people. And designing a website is a job best left to the designers. But sometimes we are forced to double up as designers, especially when putting up an individual web page or if you are a small business owner working on a tight budget.

While this guide is exclusively for web writers, here are a few basic style tips for visual design and layout of web pages for easier reading:

1. Use white space. Remember that reading on the computer screen is different from a paper document. Tightly spaced text on a computer screen is hard on the eyes. So ensure that you use a layout that allows enough white space around the text.
Tip: An easy way to do this is to enlarge the margins or narrow the width of text lines.

2. Use short paragraphs, bullets, numbered lists and tables in your layout. This will help the users to quickly locate the information they are seeking. 3. Make the important text bold to highlight it. Tip: Avoid underlining words because on the web underlined words are hyperlinks. 4. Use colour to draw attention to important headings, subheadings or keywords. If you are having trouble figuring out a colour palette for your website, try to harmonise the shades with other elements such as your logo to create colour harmony. Tip: Blue denotes hyperlinks. So avoid it while highlighting text. 5. Place your text on a contrasting background. Using black on white is a good practice that is also easy on the readers’ eyes. 6. Sans serif fonts make it easy to read on computer screens. Font size 10 or 12 is the standard for readability.
7. Avoid using animations, especially the loop animations, as they divert the viewer’s attention away from the website’s content with their continuous motion.

8. If you use images, make sure that they are small in size and easy to load. Users will invariably click away if they have to wait for different elements of a web page (videos, animations, images, sound, etc.) to load before they can see the content in its entirety. 9. Sometimes, it a good idea to give a download link if you want the reader to be able to access certain data from the relevant page. For instance, it’s a good idea to provide a .pdf link for a business plan template on a page that explains the different elements of an effective business plan. But don’t go overboard with the download feature.

A website with several download links can get annoying.

About the book:
A Quick Guide to Web Writing
ISBN: 9788178061450
Author: Jyotsna Atre
Publisher: Unicorn Books
Published: February 2008

If interested to read more or to buy the book online, please visit:
URL: http://www.pustakmahal.com/book/book/bid,,9356E/index.html