Publishing on the Web is a very simple task. Publishing content that works well in the online medium and communicates effectively is quite another matter. In Writing for the Web, author and freelance writer Crawford Kilian shares his insights about producing just the right type and amount of content for your target sites.

Kilian acknowledges early on his bias toward print publishing, but his viewpoint offers a particularly relevant discussion for other writers moving traditional content to the Web. Throughout the book, he emphasizes his three principles of Web text: orientation, information, and action. These principles wisely expand the reader's view from content and grammar to the special interactivity and technical-viewing aspects of reading online.

The book is quite brief at only 140 pages, but contains some useful traditional style tips, such as using active tense, strong verbs, and precise word choices. Ironically, the book doesn't include any screen shots to illustrate formatting guidelines in action on real Web sites. This lack of visual connection to the presented techniques detracts from the book's effectiveness.

Nothing ruins the first impression of your Web site than poorly designed content or documents haphazardly ported to electronic form. This book isn't an end-all reference to Web-content presentation, but it certainly offers some useful tips for writing effectively for cyberspace. --Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered: On-screen text Web-site structure Content organization Writing style guidelines Web text editing Corporate content Resumes Personal pages Marketing


Anne Weale, Bookworm on the Internet
I am glad I read this book before putting up my site.


The Richmond News
...offers novice and professional Web authors sound advice on writing and editing Web text for corporate sites and personal pages.


Peter Wilson, Vancouver Sun
...solid, easy-to-follow advice on how to create text that will keep the Web reader interested.


Book Description
- Hook surfers’ attention - Write informative, persuasive Web text - Create dynamic personal and corporate Web pages


From the Publisher
As Publicity Manager for Self-Counsel Press, I would like to inform visitors to this site of the follow up title to Crawford Kilian's Writing for the Web, and the original text itself. Due to the overwhelming popularity of Writing for the Web, Crawford Kilian has completed Writing for the Web: Geeks' Edition, which is available on this site and in major book stores everywhere. The primary differences between the two titles is a Style Guide for Web writers, an expanded FAQ section, additional editing exercises and the grammar section has been beefed up as well in the Geeks’ edition. The original text, Writing for the Web, has been re-issued with a new book cover and a new title: Writing for the Web: Writer's Edition(same ISBN). These two titles are the same book, and I hope this will clear up any confusion arising from the change of covers and titles. Writing for the Web: Writer's Edition and Writing for the Web: Geeks’ Edition are two different books, and will compliment the other.


From the Back Cover
T he World Wide Web inspires us to think and express ourselves in new ways. But creating a dynamic Web site doesn’t just mean using cool graphics, video, and sound; it also means writing so well that impatient surfers will stop to read what you’ve written -- and act on what they’ve read. This means writing clear, concise, and surprising interactive text. Whether you are creating a personal home page, developing your company’s Web site, or publishing an e-zine, Writing for the Web: Writers’ Edition offers sound, practical advice on organization and writing within the framework of three principles: orient readers to your site; inform readers effectively; and prompt readers to take action so you get the results you want. Exercises show you how to put these principles into practice, and critiques of real Web sites give you practical guidelines. You will learn how to -- - Break print-based writing habits that don’t work with hypertext - Edit your material for an international audience - Develop Web sites for business - Create online résumés and personal pages - Explore the rapidly growing world of online freelance writing


About the Author
Crawford Kilian is a veteran of the Internet who has been teaching and writing online since the 1980s. He has twice served as Writer in Electronic Residence for York University and is chair of the Media Technology Division of Capilano Community College in British Columbia, where he teaches how to write interactively for both multimedia and the Web. Kilian is a regular freelance contributor to both print and electronic media.


Excerpted from Writing for the Web (Writers' Edition) by Crawford Kilian. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
When early computer users and researchers began to see how they could navigate through electronic information and link one item to another using something called hypertext, they realized that it would offer readers an amazing power and freedom. If you want to learn about, say, vampires, you face a pretty tedious process if you plan to research the topic using a multi-volume encyclopedia. First you would go to the volume with all the V entries, and find "Vampires." That entry may suggest you also look at entries in other volumes: Transylvania; Dracula; Stoker, Bram; Lugosi, Bela; films, horror; bats, vampire; films, German: Nosferatu... As you consult each of these entries, you’re pulling heavy volumes off the shelf and replacing them, making notes, and generally taking up a lot of time. Even using a single-volume book to research a topic presents challenges. Such a book may have its own hypertext in the form of footnotes, end notes, appendixes, bibliographies, and an index -- even marginal scribbles by the last reader. The researcher looking for particular information soon learns to read backward: start with the index and then jump to just the pages dealing with the subject of interest. Even then, the follow-up of tracking down footnoted references and finding titles mentioned in the bibliography can be tedious and frustrating. Hypertext saves you much of that work. Each hypertext document has electronic links to other hypertext documents, much like doors between rooms in a library. If you’re reading a hypertext document about horror films and you find a mention of Bela Lugosi, the actor’s name can itself be a link to still more information. Instead of making notes, you can simply save the file about Lugosi along with all the other items you’ve encountered. And if you don’t want to read about Bela Lugosi, but you do want to read about vampire bats or Transylvanian history, you can ignore the link to the Hollywood star and continue your reading. This freedom of choice has its attractions, but some hypertext pioneers have tried to make it look like a revolution on a Gutenbergian scale. They claim that, freed from the tyranny of the author’s structure, readers can now examine any document they like, in any order they choose, and use the information any way they please. (Of course, readers can also read a print document any way they please, but it takes more effort to jump back and forth in a print-on-paper document than in an electronic document.) If each item of information is small enough, maybe just a paragraph or even a sentence, then readers have even more freedom. Instead of being led like children by the author’s hand, readers can now make the text their own property, linking its components in their own preferred way. This freedom of choice has its limits. If we just want to find out about Bram Stoker, we don’t want to waste time on Bela Lugosi, even if the author thinks Lugosi is important. But most of the time, as readers, we expect the author to have mapped out our route for us, just as we expect a travel agent to plan details of our trip. We assume the travel agent knows more than we do and can anticipate our needs. Maybe we want some flexibility built into our itinerary, but we don’t want to fly from New York to Paris, back to New York, and then to Frankfurt. Pushed to a logical extreme, the hypertext author might as well hand the reader a set of Scrabble tiles and say: "Here, make your own text." But that’s not authorship, any more than 52 Pickup is a card game. Our readers expect some kind of coherence in our hypertext. We can and should provide such coherence, but we should be aware of some specific challenges in doing so. Hypertext is by definition nonlinear, but remember that "linearity" itself is just a metaphor for a one-at-a-time sequence — especially a sequence we’re familiar with. The sequence A-B-C is "linear" only because that’s the sequence we have learned. So is 1-2-3, and so is subject-verb-object. Because we’ve memorized certain patterns, we can expect D to follow C, 3 to follow 2, and verb (usually) to follow subject. When we put information into a numbered sequence, for example, we expect #1 to be more important or more basic than #2, because we’re used to hearing important or introductory material before we hear details or complicated material that assumes we understand the basics. In the rest of this book, I’ll examine some of the problems -- and opportunities -- that hypertext offers to you as a web site writer. As you develop content for your web site, you should bear in mind some basic facts about the medium. Computer-Screen Text Is Hard to Read You may not realize it but your monitor has awful resolution. Maybe the text looks crisp and sharp compared to that on those old green-on-black monitors of the mid-1980s. But take a look at your text on-screen and then at a laser printout. Once you look back at your screen, the text will be a sight for sore eyes, and you’ll realize how difficult it is to read lots of text on-screen. Studies in the 1980s, reported by web analyst and usability advocate Jakob Nielsen, found that reading from a monitor is 25 percent slower than reading from printed paper. This seems to result from the poor resolution of computer screens, and in 1998, Nielsen was reporting that expensive experimental monitors with very high resolution can bring reading speeds back up to normal. He predicts high-end users will have such screens by 2003, and all users by 2008.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Publishing on the Web is a very simple task. Publishing content that works well in the online medium and communicates effectively is quite another matter. In Writing for the Web, author and freelance writer Crawford Kilian shares his insights about producing just the right type and amount of content for your target sites. Kilian acknowledges early on his bias toward print publishing, but his viewpoint offers a particularly relevant discussion for other writers moving traditional content to the Web. Throughout the book, he emphasizes his three principles of Web text: orientation, information, and action. These principles wisely expand the reader's view from content and grammar to the special interactivity and technical-viewing aspects of reading online. The book is quite brief at only 140 pages, but contains some useful traditional style tips, such as using active tense, strong verbs, and precise word choices. Ironically, the book doesn't include any screen shots to illustrate formatting guidelines in action on real Web sites. This lack of visual connection to the presented techniques detracts from the book's effectiveness. Nothing ruins the first impression of your Web site than poorly designed content or documents haphazardly ported to electronic form. This book isn't an end-all reference to Web-content presentation, but it certainly offers some useful tips for writing effectively for cyberspace. —Stephen W. Plain Topics covered: On-screen text Web-site structure Content organization Writing style guidelines Web text editing Corporate content Resumes Personal pages Marketing

SYNOPSIS

Writing for the Web offers sound principles that writers should bear in mind as well as exercises to strengthen writing skills and eliminate bad writing habits. The principles are based on the author's firsthand experience and on the experience of organizations that rely on Web communications for their very existence.

FROM THE CRITICS

Marc Duane Anderson - Marc Duane Anderson reviews books for American Book Review, Canadian Literature and The Writer.

Crawford Kilian's book on writing for the Internet benefits from his refreshing approach: Rather than coming across as an expert, Kilian aims to spark ideas and open dialogue. If what he has to offer helps, he's pleased, but he also hopes to be "rebutted and superseded."

With dot-coms folding like a cheap deck of cards these days, the subject is more timely than ever, because quality content can mean the difference between life and death for a Web site.

The book is a carefully crafted and well-written dissertation on how and what to write for the World Wide Web. The increasingly competitive and crowded Web's users demand text that will grab them and hold their attention, or they'll simply click and surf away.

Kilian sums up the task at hand well when he says, "Your role as a Web author is to make your reader's job effortless." He endorses text that looks "invitingly brief," but at the same time, lures readers with some kind of hook so they'll keep reading.

The book is loaded with useful tips and strategies, including how to use white space effectively; "chunk" information (present it in small, digestible chunks); make sure graphics enhance, rather than distract from the message; maintain a "you" (the reader) focus; appreciate the value of minimalism, coherency, and consistency; and avoid the use of extended metaphors, because they don't work in hypertext.
And, of course, there are the old standbys that need to be heard again and again: Know your audience; make sure text is clear, brief and useful; understand the importance of proofreading; and so on.

In other practical advice, Kilian recommends that if you're using all caps you scale down the font size to avoid the pretension of overkill that might annoy readers and drive them away; while other suggestions include selecting a readable font and a line length that is both user- and printer-friendly.

Perhaps most valuable is the strategic planning Kilian prescribes since, "Web writing, like chess, means you have to think several moves ahead-and put yourself in your readers' shoes."

The book also contains many "links" to other valuable resources and is a must-read for anyone thinking of plying the writing trade in cyberspace. My only regret is the book isn't available in a downloadable PDF format!

Internet Book Watch

Writing For The Web: Geeks' Edition is specifically designed for those who aspire to utilize the Internet as an outlet for their writing. Internet veteran Crawford Kilian draws upon his years of experience and expertise to provide the reader with a convenient, easy-to-use Webwriter's style guide that will prove invaluable for dealing with the rules governing abbreviations, biased terms, capitalization, compound words, and cliches. The proffered exercises will develop webwriting techniques and a wealth of practical advice will enable the aspiring webwriter to adapt content from print to Webtext; avoid common grammar and usage errors; develop content for corporate websites; even edit material for an international audience. Whether writing for a personal or corporate website, or writing for an on-line publication, Writing For The Web will enable anyone to be an effective Internet wordsmith.

ACCREDITATION