Does your website grab people's attention?
Yahoo Style Guide covershotDo the stories on your website grab your reader's attention? Do you know what makes people click on your story first? Even if your site is full of videos and flashy graphics, better writing makes sure your message gets to more people, more quickly. So where do you start? The Yahoo! Style Guide can help you review what you're doing, offers top tips, and best of all, it's FREE.
A well-maintained website is vital for any organisation and SCIP continues to produce sites that are easy to update yourself. It's the best place to send people when you're running events, campaigns, or fundraising activities, or when you're recruiting new staff, volunteers or trustees. Well-written stories will draw people in and keep them engaged. It's called a home page for a reason - your visitors should feel comfortable and get to know more about you.
But websites are not the same as printed pages. For one thing they appear on computer screens, which may be different sizes and colours depending how the computer is set up. And then there is the fact that we tend to scan webpages, rather than read from top to bottom. More like a newspaper page than a book.
As Mark James, Web Designer at SCIP explains, for many people a website is something which sits on the web, out of site and out of mind.
"When we build a website for someone we often offer an extra workshop to help people get to grips with writing for the web. Style guides like this one from Yahoo! show how you need to practise your writing to make your site work for you."
Although written with a heavy north American slant The Yahoo! Style Guide is a great resource for anyone who needs to produce words for websites, email newletters or any other online activity - it could
even improve your Facebook status updates. Like any style guide it helps you bring consistency to your grammar and spelling. It's "email" not "e-mail", but LEGO and Lego are optional...
The book is available from Amazon for about £12, but the first place to head is the free website. It covers a lot of the main topics from the book and is an easy read for beginners and more advanced writers.
There are plenty of other books about writing for the web but this is one of the best free online resources, especially for beginners.
Check out the web version at bit.ly/kzJIsk
