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Day 7 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

One thing that new bloggers sometimes fail to understand is that The internet is a unique medium, and your information must be presented in a unique way.  Although you may have a great idea, have written a well researched post, and are generally on top of your game, it means nothing if nobody reads your content.  On the internet, people scan, not read, webpages.

When you read a book you are confronted with blocks of text, and you work your way through them on paragraph at a time, one page at a time.  On the internet however, people generally skim over webpages and pick up the most important information.  If they like what they see they may read the whole article, but don’t count on it.

The moral of this story is that you have to make your webpage easy for your visitors to read.   There are several different things that you can do to make sure that your content is easy to read. Implement these tips and you will find your users sticking around longer.

– Tips on Writing Style –

1) Keep it simple! Only 1 topic per page please.  Long rambling blog posts may be easy to write,  (actually I think they’re hard, but to each their own),  but they are extremely difficult to read.  Pick 1 topic for each post and stick to it.   If you want to cover more than 1 topic, start another post.

2) Paragraphs, learn to love them.  - Use paragraph breaks liberally.  Huge blocks of text are very intimidating on a webpage.  Break up your thoughts with paragraphs.

3) Lists - Lists can be a bloggers best friend.  They are a uniquely scannable method of writing. As a bonus they are generally incredibly easy to write. Pepper your blog posts with lists and you won’t regret it.

– Appearance –

4) Differentiate Your Text - Use bold, italics, and block quotes to make your important text stand out from what is around it.  This will ensure people reading through quickly can get the most important content.

5) Make Your Links Look Classic - Make sure that you are links are easy to pick out and distinguish from the surrounding content.  Blue underlined text is classic for links.  Don’t make any other text blue, and try to avoid underlines so as to not confuse your visitors.

6) Sub-Headers - If you must write long posts, break them up with sub-headers.  Make each section topical so the user can scroll down the page to find the topics that they are interested in.