Writing in web

1. Promotional writing wont be read. Long text blocks without images and keywords marked in bold or italics will be skipped.
Exaggerated language will be ignored.
2. Avoid cute or clever names, marketing-induced names, company-specific names, and unfamiliar technical names. For instance, if you
describe a service and want users to create an account, sign up is better than start now! which is again better than explore our
services.
3. Use scannable layout (categorize the content, use multiple heading levels, use visual elements and bulleted lists which break the flow
of uniform text blocks),
4. Use plain and objective language (a promotion doesnt need to sound like advertisement; give your users some reasonable and
objective reason why they should use your service or stay on your web-site)
5. Therefore, we would expect Web writers to split their writing into smaller, coherent pieces to avoid long scrolling pages. Each page
would be structured as an inverted pyramid, but the entire work would seem more like a set of pyramids floating in cyberspace than as
a traditional "article". Unfortunately, it is hard to learn this new writing style. I am certainly not there yet myself, as you can see.
Web pages have to employ scannable text , using:
6. highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
7. meaningful sub-headings (not "clever" ones)
8. bulleted lists
9. one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
10. the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
11. half the word count (or less) than conventional writing
12. Credibility can be increased by high-quality graphics, good writing, and use of outbound hypertext links . Links to other sites show that
the authors have done their homework and are not afraid to let readers visit other sites.
13. Users detested "marketese" ; the promotional writing style with boastful subjective claims ("hottest ever") that currently is prevalent
on the Web. Web users are busy: they want to get the straight facts. Also, credibility suffers when users clearly see that the site
exaggerates.
FUENTE: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/
The three main guidelines for writing for the Web are:
Be succinct : write no more than 50% of the text you would have used in a hardcopy publication
Write for scannability : don't require users to read long continuous blocks of text
Use hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages
Fuente: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/be-succinct-writing-for-the-web/
Users
When a new visitor approaches a design layout, the first thing he/she tries to do is to scan the page and divide the content area into digestible
pieces of information.
On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that users don't scroll ,(*) so they will
very frequently be left to read only the top part of an article. Very interested readers will scroll, and these few motivated souls will reach the
foundation of the pyramid and get the full story in all its gory detail.
Users prefer to scan rather than read, want text to be short and to the point, and detest overly hyped promotional writing ("marketese"). We
found improvements in usability for new versions of a site that were either scannable, concise, or objective (rather than promotional) in style.
When all three writing style improvements were combined in a final version of the site, usability increased 124%. These results prompted us to
apply the improvements to pages from Sun's website.
Fuente: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/applying-writing-guidelines-web-pages/
Design
Organize
Economize (Four major points to be considered: simplicity, clarity, distinctiveness, and emphasis.)
Communicate
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