A practical checklist for writing for the web
Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Run through this the next time writing for the web comes up.
Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
The checklist
- People scan before they read
- Short paragraphs and clear subheadings do the heavy lifting
- Cut the throat-clearing and start with the point
- Someone is named as the owner
- There is a date to review it again
What it costs to ignore
People scan before they read. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
The short version
Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about writing for the web before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- People scan before they read — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.