Online Journalism 2: Features and Personal Web Sites

Writing for the web

Today I'm planning to talk about some of Jakob Nielsen's ideas about how users read web pages. He argues that, because web readers don't read screen text in the same way they do printed matter, when you work online you  need to change the way you write and the way you format the resulting prose.

Nielsen developed his ideas in the early days of the web - you can still read some of his original essays about web writing - e.g. How Users Read on the Web (there's a longer version of this online, if you want more detail), Microcontent - How to write Headlines, Page Titles and Subject Lines and Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace.

Nielsen's guidelines are very much a product of the time (the mid-nineties) when they were written. They also reflect the fact that he's more of a usability expert/designer than a writer. He's adapted them slightly since the late 90s, but not that much. I'll try to hand out a photocopy of a section from his latest book, Prioritizing Web Usability, which came out last year.

Nielsen's ideas have been very influential. Many big online sites follow his advice on producing brief, 'scannable' text. You will need to know about this if you end up working for one of the big online news/media organisations.

Other people have approached writing online more from a writer's perspective. For a slightly alternative take, try Crawford Kilian's Effective Web Writing. Kilian's piece is much more discursive - more like a standard piece of print prose. Nielsen might argue that Kilian should have broken it down, edited it, chunked it, added headings and bullet points to make it more scannable and web-friendly. What do you think?

Today's session

Today we're going to be doing a mix of things. We'll look at how your email interviews are going - whether you need to send follow-ups, what kind of material you've got etc. Those of you who weren't here last week - I'll go over what we talked about last week and help you sort out someone to interview and a list of questions.

Next we'll look at some ideas about how to write effectively online - in particular the views of usability guru Jakob Nielsen.

Next, we'll work some more on building your knowledge of Fireworks. We're going to do a tutorial from a manual that will help you learn how to draw shapes and add colours and effects. The aim is to give you some skills you can then use to start creating some of the graphics for your web sites - from buttons to banners.