Hi there, and thanks for tuning in. This week, I'm going to talk about
something I don't see Web designers thinking about enough. That's
probably because it has little or nothing to do with actual code.
Instead, it's about the people who read the sites you create, how they
read those sites, and how to help them get the most out of their
experience. That is, after all, what all this is supposed to be for
isn't it?

To start out today, think about how you experience the Web. What do you
actually do when you're surfing around? You might be looking for
specific information or you might be browsing, not sure of what you're
looking for. If you want to find something in particular, or even if
you're just lazily passing time, you want to find out if the Website
you're at is going to help or entertain you and you want to find that
out as easily and quickly as possible.

Think about how you read the information on the pages. Do you read every
word, or do you find yourself quickly scanning the contents of the page
for interesting words and links? One fact that I think is often
overlooked is this: The Web is much more like cable television than you
think. How so? Observe, if you have the chance, how most people choose
to experience cable TV. They usually engage in "channel surfing" --
basically going through the channels as quickly as possible, eager to
find a station of interest but also eager to avoid anything
uninteresting. Now think about the Web. It's kind of like cable with
about 8 million channels...and a keyboard. It's just as easy to switch
channels, but you have a lot more options. That's a lot of competition.

Instead of fighting the inevitable fact that many Web users are channel
surfing, why not use it to your advantage? Today's lesson is how to
write for your pages, taking into account the extremely short attention
span most people have on the WWW. How are you going to get them to stay
on your site? Well, if your site doesn't have what they're looking for,
they probably wont spend much time on it. There might be nothing you can
do about that, but if your site does have something their interested in,
you want them to find it easily and not waste time sifting through pages
and pages of information.

According to Sun Microsystems (http://www.sun.com/980713/Webwriting/),
79% of users don't read the things you write word for word. A vast
majority of them scan pages instead. Scanning is simply looking briefly
over a page for interesting subject matter - words or links or whatever.
So, if you've taken the time to write out a detailed statement of
purpose for your site, and it's over a few sentences long, well, it's
possible that not very many people are ever going to bother reading all
of it. This doesn't mean that you should throw away your spell checker
or abandon the rules of grammar. It does mean that you should present
content with the knowledge of how people are going to be absorbing it.
This makes your pages easier to scan and more helpful/entertaining to
those who actually want to be there.

Things to Remember:

a) Cut back on total number of words. Try to use only half the words
you would use if you were printing the information out on paper.
b) Emphasize key words using the strong tag (). Avoid
emphasizing entire sentences.
c) Color text or text backgrounds to make important words stand out.
d) If you have to have an entire page of text, make sure to use
paragraph headers and sub-headers to clearly define sections of
content. Limit the number of subsections on a page to 4.
e) Make use of bulleted lists (for information on bulleted lists,
visit the HTML newsletter archives) but keep the number of list
items to less than ten.
f) Consider using hyperlinks to navigate visitors to information
within your page. For more information on named anchors, visit
the HTML newsletter archives.