WEB

Writing for the Web

Strapped firmly on the Internet roller coaster, web consultant and writer Christina Sng ponders the general failure of online content and finds that writing for the web is a vastly different animal altogether

Photo by Domenico Loia on Unsplash

In the last millennium, revolutionaries like Bill Gates predicted that the web would replace print newspapers and magazines in the 21st century. Now that we are here, print media has never been stronger and web content has been severely dwindling, both from lack of funds and the inability to sustain interest.

Since the fall of the mighty web, content providers have been scratching their heads at why their business models failed and lamenting how users fled, without an iota of loyalty, to their competitors a mere mouse-click away.

However, looking at the successful few that have made it, the reason becomes clear: delivery. Their content is broken down into sections; paragraphs are short; their prose is simple, straightforward and to the point.

The Problems with Existing Web Content

Essentially, the web is a totally different medium from print. People scan on the web; they don’t read. They scan for headlines, easily passing over an endless stream of words.

Photo by Simon Abrams on Unsplash

With scarce branding, user loyalty is almost nil. Give them messy, hard-to-read information and they’ll look for it elsewhere, giving the there-are-much-more-fish-in-the-sea analogy a whole new meaning. After all, we’re talking about information here.

What distinguishes the meat from the fat is the way the information is presented — cut, concise and organised, something many Content Managers and Front End Developers have neglected to apply. It is no wonder it is a gargantuan task trying to “capture eyeballs”, as some marketing terminologist so aptly put it, when the material is raw and unpalatable.

Branding notwithstanding (I’ll examine this in another article), how do you take a print article and put it on the web? The…