Writing for the web: what to get right first

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. If you only fix one thing about writing for the web this quarter, make it the first item below.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Start here

People scan before they read. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Then this

Short paragraphs and clear subheadings do the heavy lifting. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Eventually

Cut the throat-clearing and start with the point. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What this looks like day to day

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. 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
• Short paragraphs and clear subheadings do the heavy lifting — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.