Guidelines for Writing Web Content:

• Why do you want a Web presence?
• What do you hope to accomplish? What are your goals?
• Who is your target audience? What do individuals in this group want to know?
• What action do you want users to take? What information can you provide to help your audience acheive this action? How can they accomplish this action?
• Determine the most important information points or tasks. Provide information in order of importance to the users.

Content Organization/Structure

Put yourself in a user's mindset. How would the material make the most sense? What structure would allow you to find what you’re looking for quickly? This approach is often referred to as “user-centered design.”

A structure that the user can understand is reflected in navigation that can be used to easily manuever from one section or subsection to another, with subsections providing more detailed information on a particular topic.

The navigation for a Web site or section must make sense to the user and provide a sense of where they are going. Research tells us that when users are faced with more than five or six navigation choices, they get confused and don’t know what to select.

Group information into logical groups of two to six areas. A structure that goes from general to specific works well. Think about what users ask for most frequently --- those are the topics users want to be able to select.

Say what you need to say as directly as possible. Excessive word count and worthless details make it harder for users to extract useful information. The more you say, the more people tune out your message.

Review of Steps in the Process:

• Identify your target audience. Find out as much as you can about their interests, their way of looking at things and their understanding of words.
• Determine the individual information points (or ideas) you want to communicate.
• Group together the points that are related in some definable way. These groups become the sections or organization of your web pages.
• Use titles that are short and clearly describe the contents of the section or subsection. This becomes the navigation.
• Try to avoid “jargon”  and abbreviations, unless you are certain that the users who would be in that particular section are very familiar with the language.

Don't create pages until you have the content ready. “Under Construction” messages are very frustrating for users. When they click on a link and are taken to an empty page, they have wasted a click.

Copy Writing

Despite the visual nature of many web pages, and the move toward more multimedia (animation, video and audio), most web page content comes down to words. Someone must compose the words to communicate the messages we want to send to target audience.

Writing for the Web differs from writing for printed materials because people don’t “read” web pages the way they read a printed page. People scan materials or see in small “chunks” of words on the Web.

Writing for web pages means writing in a more concise, shortened style.

• Avoid long, scrolling pages (ideally, pages should be no longer than two screen heights).
• Determine key ideas and key words to express those ideas.
• Use “bullet points,” or a series of short phrases in list form.
• Communicate one main idea in one paragraph.
• Highlight key words.
• Avoid italics, they can be difficult to read on some monitors.
• Use action verbs.
• Stay focused on the essential ideas.
• Use concise headlines to communicate.
• Cut the fluff!

For more information, see http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/

Fonts

Font refers to the type face and the size of the type. This becomes problematic for the Web because most browsers allow the user to determine whether to use a preferred font or to use the font specified by the page that is downloaded.

Content providers should also note that Windows and Macintosh computers display fonts differently. In general, a given font will appear larger on a Windows computer.

For the SLU Web site, the sans serif font family “Verdana,Arial,Helvetica” is required. Body text size should be “1” (the HTML font size). Header text is "2."

Use a white page background with black or dark colored type to make the page easy to read.

When composing Web content using a word processing application such as MS Word, it is best to turn off “smart” quotes. These are characters that are not part of the standard alphabet (ASCII) that computers understand. When material is copied from the word processor file containing smart quotes and pasted into the Web page, the result is odd looking characters in the content where an apostrophe or quotation marks appear in the word processor. Should this occur, the characters can be changed by simply deleting the existing character and replace it with the same character from the keyboard while in an HTML editing program or an authoring program, such as Dreamweaver.

Page Layout

Marketing and Web Services recommends that pages be designed to be easily viewed on a 640 x 480 pixel screen – the size normally associated with 15 in. monitors. While the most commonly used computer monitors have gotten larger over the past few years (800 x 600 or 17 in. monitors are now most common), we receive a substantial number of visitors who use the smaller monitors. Many prospective students visit slu.edu from their school computer labs, which are sometimes less than the best.

Try to place graphics and copy on each page so that no scrolling left or right is required to see everything on the page. Be careful that a graphic does not force the content area beyond this width.

Web developers sometimes find it convenient to build pages using FRAMES. While this can be somewhat easier to maintain, users find this format confusing and difficult to use. When a user clicks the browser Back button or clicks on the print icon, they are often surprised by what happens. Also, many find frames visually unappealing, especially when accompanied by scroll bars. We do not recommend the use of frames.

Use of Graphics

Large graphics cause lengthy download times. However, graphics can help communicate information and provide visual interest to break up large amounts of text. Web users have come to expect graphics, and many users look upon the Web as a “visual” medium.

The size of a graphic refers to the amount of memory it requires, the “bytes.” Not only height and width but also how color information is encoded determine a graphic’s size. The information encoding is determined by the file format. Web graphics typically use three formats: GIF, PNG or JPEG (JPG).

In general, use GIFs for line art, or images that have clear distinctions between lines and between colors. Use JPEG (JPG) for photographs or other images that use gradations of color or values. PNG is a relatively new format that works like a GIF. Unfortunately, the smaller we make the size of a specific graphic the less detail or quality it retains.

Various graphics programs have the ability to convert one format to another. Applications such as Adobe Image Ready, Adobe Photoshop, and Macromedia Fireworks are used by professional Web developers to optimize graphics – to make the files sizes as small as possible while maintaining acceptable quality. In the HTML code for the page, be sure to specify the height and width of the graphic. This will make the page load more quickly.

Also, use “ALT” tags to give the graphic a description of a word or two. Users that are visually impaired often use software that will “read” a Web page to them. The ALT tag lets the user know what is there.

Similarly, graphics made up of contrasting colors or values are easier for visually impaired users to see and recognize.

Links

The ability to move quickly from one page to another or one Web site to another is one of the greatest assets of the Web. This quality makes the web pages interactive. The user can control where they go and when they go from one page to another or one Web site to another.

A link, or hyper link, means that the user can click on a word or graphic and call another web page into their browser window. The navigation for a site or section actually consists of a series of links between pages.

Currently, the term “link” often refers to links from one Web site to another, just as this document contains “links” to online articles about certain topics.

Web sites that are designed for instruction often link to other Web sites that contain additional information that the author of the Web site does not want to or cannot repeat.

Some sections of the SLU Web site may want to make us of this technique. Content authors should seriously consider the fact that when a link to another site is provided and the users selects it, the user will leave the SLU site.

In many cases, this may not be a problem. If links to various sites are provided as part of the content or research needs of a course, leaving the SLU site is to be expected.

Content providers should use discretion in what links are provided in their sections. We recommend that links that do take the user to another site be indicated with text or an icon.

Resources

General information about the University, such as the campus map, mission statement and location is used in several sections of the Web site. Rather than repeating the information, developers should link to the pages designed by Marketing and Web Services to supply this information. A comprehensive list of these pages and their URLs will be available soon.