#25223
Branding Copy and Web Sites: A Bad Fit
The trouble with using text as a branding tool on web pages is that it gets in the way of what visitors are looking for. Visitors want and expect text to be useful and information. They are in 'active' and 'engaged' mode. They are searching. They want something. Text that isn't useful is disappointing.
Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Marketing
#25493
Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs 
Weblogs (blogs)--frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence--are the latest genre of Internet communication to attain widespread popularity, yet their characteristics have not been systematically described. This paper presents the results of a content analysis of 203 randomly-selected weblogs, comparing the empirically observable features of the corpus with popular claims about the nature of weblogs, and finding them to differ in a number of respects. Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented towards external events, and under-estimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self-expression. Based on the profile generated by the empirical analysis, we consider the likely antecedents of the blog genre, situate it with respect to the dominant forms of digital communication on the Internet today, and advance predictions about its long-term impacts.
Herring, Susan C., Lois Ann Scheidt, Sabrina Bonus and Elijah Wright. (We)blog Research on Genre Project, The (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging
#22401
Suggests that knowing how to create a Web page is only a small step toward writing good hypertext. The article is the first installment in a two-part series on hypertext for anyone who writes anything for the Web. In a world where designers create systems to offload work to secretaries and writers, both technical and non-technical people need a sense of the possibilities opened up by hypertext.
Matias, Nathan. SitePoint (2003). Design>Web Design>Writing
#21132
Call Them Demons, Call Them Heroes
The language you use on your web site is critically important and shapes the user experience in ways that you might not expect. You can seriously harm or augment the experience by changing words in small ways.
Rhodes, John S. WebWord (2000). Design>Web Design>Writing
#27549
Calling All Designers: Learn to Write!
You know all that copy that goes around your forms and in your confirmation e-mails? Who’s writing it? Derek Powazek explains why it’s important for user-interface designers to sharpen up their writing skills.
Powazek, Derek. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>User Interface>Writing
#25222
The Cautious Writer, 2005: Protect Your Income
I'm no expert on the economy, but I don’t see a lot of signs of growth and smiling faces in 2005. As writers, we are in the fortunate position of being able to protect ourselves against fluctuations in the economy, to some degree. To protect your own income over the next year, here are some suggestions.
Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing
#20609
Most information on the World Wide Web is gathered in short reference documents that are intended to be read nonsequentially. This is particularly true of sites whose contents are mostly technical or administrative documents. Long before the Web was invented, technical writers discovered that readers appreciate short 'chunks' of information that can be located and scanned quickly.
Lynch, Patrick J. and Sarah Horton. Yale University (1999). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Writing
#28391
Once you have your content, arranged it into a likely architecture, and worked out where it will sit on the page, you're ready to design the display layer.
Hunt, Ben. Web Design From Scratch (2006). Design>Web Design>Writing>Rhetoric
#23922
La manière dont vous allez organiser votre contenu est fortement dépendante du produit que vous allez éditer : page d'accueil, chronique, interview, brève, dossier, lettre d'information,...
Hardy, Jean-Marc. Redaction (2004). (French) Articles>Web Design>Writing
#25436
Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs
Weblogs (blogs) have been heralded as a new space for collaborative creativity, a medium for breaking free of the constraints of previous forms and allowing authors greater access to flexible publishing methods. This generalization seems extreme: genre studies done by Crowston and Williams (2000) and Shepherd and Watters (1998) lend credence to the notion that weblogs are evolutionary descendents of other visual media, such as newspapers and pamphlets. In this study, we apply content-analytic methods (Bauer, 2000) to a random sample of weblogs as a means of exploring current visual trends within the blogosphere.
Scheidt, Lois Ann and Elijah Wright. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging
#31915
Company Name First in Microcontent? Sometimes!
Typically, you should deemphasize your company's name in links, but a new guideline recommends frontloading the name for search engine links under certain conditions.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Hypertext
#20918
The goal of this course is to foster a sophisticated understanding of rhetorical situation, style and arrangement. Writing for the electronic medium with its specific demands should reveal by contrast material aspects of the practice of conventionalwriting that may have been taken for granted. Technologies encourage certain kinds of thinking and behavior and discourage others. Writing has always been one such technology. The World Wide Web is not the introduction of, but a shift in, technology. Students will analyze, conceptualize and create websites with HTML and graphics without the use of WYSIWYG helpers. WYSIWYG programs can make website development easy; however, we will stay close to the actual code in order to get a better understanding of the medium.
Levy, Matthew A. University of Texas. Academic>Courses>Computers and Writing>Web Design
#10531
Concise, Scannable, and Objective: How to Write for the Web
Studies of how users read on the Web found that they do not actually read: instead, they scan the text. A study of five different writing styles found that a sample Web site scored 58% higher in measured usability when it was written concisely, 47% higher when the text was scannable, and 27% higher when it was written in an objective style instead of the promotional style used in the control condition and many current Web pages. Combining these three changes into a single site that was concise, scannable, and objective at the same time resulted in 124% higher measured usability.
Morkes, John and Jakob Nielsen. Alertbox (1997). Design>Web Design>Writing>Usability
#26146
Content for Tourism and Hospitality Sites
My worst experiences with hospitality sites have been to do with vague location, online timetables, poor follow-up communication, and out of date information. I have wasted days as a result, which I hate.
McAlpine, Rachel. Quality Web Content (2004). Articles>Web Design>Marketing>Writing
#28342
After ensuring that content is useful, well-written, and in a format that is suitable for the Web, it is important to ensure that the information is clearly organized. In some cases, the content on a site can be organized in multiple ways to accommodate multiple audiences. Organizing content includes putting critical information near the top of the site, grouping related elements, and ensuring that all necessary information is available without slowing the user with unneeded information. Content should be formatted to facilitate scanning, and to enable quick understanding.
Usability.gov (2006). Design>Information Design>Web Design>Writing
#25492
Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis "From the Bottom Up" 
The 'blogosphere' has been claimed to be a densely interconnected conversation, with bloggers linking to other bloggers, referring to them in their entries, and postingcomments on each other's blogs. Most such characterizations have privileged a subset of popular blogs, known asthe 'A-list.' This study empirically investigates the extent to which, and in what patterns, blogs are interconnected, taking as its point of departure randomly-selected blogs. Quantitative social network analysis, visualization of linkpatterns, and qualitative analysis of references and comments in pairs of reciprocally-linked blogs show thatA-list blogs are overrepresented and central in the network, although other groupings of blogs are moredensely interconnected. At the same time, a majority of blogs link sparsely or not at all to other blogs in the sam-ple, suggesting that the blogosphere is partially interconnected and sporadically conversational.
Herring, Susan C., Inna Kouper, John C. Paolillo, Lois Ann Scheidt,Michael Tyworth, Peter Welsch, Elijah Wright and Ning Yu. (We)blog Research on Genre Project, The (2005). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging
#24592
Converting Print Read to Web Scan Text
Web sites are full of print media text. Shame on them. Users are in a hurry. They hate dense blocks of lengthy blabbering. They ignore most text on their hunt for Relevant Content. Find out how to convert Print Read text into easily consumed information for the web.
Streight, Steven. Blogger.com (2004). Articles>Web Design>Scanning>Writing
#11891
Converting Science News for the Web
With the Internet emerging as a primary newsgathering source, many traditional media outlets have converted their products for online viewing. This paper explores how two science news magazines, New Scientist and Science News, have approached this challenge. Elements of hyptertext theory are also included.
Carsten, Laura D. EServer (2001). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Scientific Communication
#31617
The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome
It is perhaps the market forces driving web development projects that find us aligning ourselves with the lexicons of marketing and advertising rather than publishing. As a result, we have lots of “brand identity guidelines,” but not so many “style guides” (for content, at least). We have “strategists,” but no “commissioning editors,” and we more often “go live” than “publish.” Hence, we tend to first think “copywriter” when trying to get our content sorted, whereas very often an editor is the person we should be engaging. That’s not to say there aren’t editors in our industry—there are—but they tend to be a part of large online publishing projects after launch rather than a part of the development lifecycle from the beginning. (Somehow, we’ve become a kind of freak cousin of publishing, ignoring that industry’s expertise.) In many cases, an editor would be a great addition to our process as well as, in some cases, a better and more rational investment than a copywriter.
Ronalds, Pepi. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Writing
#18181
Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. As a result, people don’t want to read a lot of text from computer screens: you should write 50% less text and not just 25% less since it’s not only a matter of reading speed but also a matter of feeling good.
Communication Circle, The (1998). Articles>Web Design>Writing
#25553
Weblogs are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore for those of us who spend much time reading the Web. Also known by the inscrutable nickname 'blogs', weblogs are something of a hard nut to crack. Compounding the difficulty is the fact that a great deal of weblog content today is about weblogs and weblog technology. What are weblogs? What's the big deal? Why should we pay attention? We attempt to answer these questions in the essay that follows.
Grumet, Andrew. Grumet.net (2002). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging
#28839
Discovering That Writing for the Web is Different...Every Day, for the First Time
Every self-appointed pundit on the planet is saying that users are the new 'owners' of the online medium.
Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2007). Articles>Web Design>Writing
#28147
Do Internet Users Want Deep Content or Immediate Gratification?
For a long time I have been an advocate of quality content on web sites. And now I am conducting an experiment that pitches quality content against immediate gratification.
Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2006). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Writing
#31510
Little things mean a lot. Especially online. Microcontent—or the headlines, decks, subheads and other 'small' pieces of web copy—actually do most of the communicating on your web site. Handled poorly, microcontent can confuse and frustrate web visitors. Here's how to write microcontent to communicate to—instead of discombobulate—your readers.
Wylie, Ann. Communication World Bulletin (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Metadata
#24202
Editing Web Pages: A Second Look
How to edit Web pages--with revision tracking--using Microsoft Word.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Intercom (2004). Articles>Editing>Web Design>Writing
