The University's website is its main way of communicating in detail to a mass audience. Potential staff, students and business partners will judge us by our website, not only by its design and structure, but also by its written content.

A badly written or verbose page is less likely to be read, or the information may be misunderstood. It may leave an impression of an establishment or a department which is not well organised.

Here is a brief guide to writing for web that might help.

your audience| - keep it simple| - good design| - help|

Who is your audience?

Are you writing for:

• potential or current students
• potential or current staff
• the general public
• academics in a certain field
• business people
• other audiences
• more than one type of audience?

It's important to decide before you begin, because this should influence your style of writing. Pages written for potential undergraduates will need to be more informal than those for academic staff, obviously.

It will also influence your content, of course. Technical terms in pages written for academics should not need to be explained; those in pages for the general public will need to be explained clearly and simply.

Keep it simple and concise

People read information on the web in a different way than on paper. One study (Markes & Nielsen|, 1997) found that most people skim text on the screen. Another study (Poynter Institute/Stanford University|) found that only a third of visitors read a whole article and so headlines and summaries were important.

So it is best to keep your writing as simple, immediate and concise as possible. Busy people do not have a lot of time to read material on the web and they will appreciate your saving their time by writing simply. To do this:

• use active verbs rather than passive
• keep sentences short and use only a few of them in a paragraph
• use shorter Anglo-Saxon words than longer Latin ones ('the lecture starts at 8pm', rather than 'the lecture commences at 8pm')
• avoid jargon – words like 'environment', 'paradigm', 'situation', and 'methodology' are usually not needed.

So, avoid:

It will be seen that the great majority of staff in the department are people-facing in an environment in which a model of full employee-competence is being actively developed.

which is hard to understand and verbose: Instead try:

Most of the department's staff deal directly with the public and we train them so they can carry out their jobs fully.

• Write consistently: The University's Style Guide sets out the style for corporate publications and should be used.

Good design

Ensure that your text on the web is well laid out. This means avoiding:

• running the text right across the screen – this makes it hard to read.
• using a lot of different fonts.
• extensive use of capital letters or italics.
• extensive use of centred or right-aligned text.
• using light coloured text on a light background (or dark text on a dark background).
• long paragraphs.
• a succession of paragraphs without a heading.
• abutting the text too closely to images and photographs.

It is often a good idea if:

• lists are bullet pointed.
• summaries are used to give the reader the gist of lengthy text.
• headlines and section headers are used to break up the text and guide the reader through the page.
• 'top of page' buttons are regularly used in long pages or lists.
  

Help

Contact the Web Coordinator| if you need help. They can advise on writing and design.