A short guide to writing for the web

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Everything we would tell a client about writing for the web in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What it costs to ignore

People scan before they read. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Where to start

Short paragraphs and clear subheadings do the heavy lifting. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What to watch for

Cut the throat-clearing and start with the point. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

In practice

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. 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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.