You know who you are. You write and write and write and think, wow, that’s good writing! That is, if you’re writing for a magazine. However, you’re writing for the web, and that’s a different animal.
We see it all the time; tell the whole story and include all the dirty details. But the web is different, and its readers are different. They don’t necessarily want the whole story. They only want what they want.
In today’s mass migration to responsive web design, writers can no longer write long content. Imagine that beautiful and long story you wrote yesterday. Now imagine it on an iPhone screen. That sucker will scroll for miles. And you might say, well, people are used to vertical scrolling on a phone. Yes, but not pages and pages of text. They scroll when the content is easy to scan as it wizzes by, like photos.
That leads me to experience. Sit back and think about the experience you are giving a reader with long content. Think they’ll stay on your site? Think some will bounce?
Here are some tips regarding writing for the web:
- Write for quick user engagement. Get them hooked right away
- Keep content short and concise. A paragraph or two with most pertinent content in the first paragraph.
- Use bullet points to emphasize content.
- Make text links longer so they’re easier to tap on
- When you embark on writing, try this. In Microsoft Word, insert a one cell table. This is where your writing will be. Grab the right table border and drag it to the left so the table is about the size of a cell phone screen. Now you have an idea of what your content will look like on a phone. You can then expand it to tablet size, then desktop size
