Monday, December 18, 2006

Nielsen’s paper

Surprisingly Nielsen's paper written in 1997 still holds credible information on how to properly address online writing. It identity's key features such as:

  • identifying that users do not read word for word and tend to scan
  • highlighted keywords
  • meaningful sub-headings
  • bulleted lists
  • one idea per paragraph
  • starting with the conclusion
  • half the word count than conventional writing
These points are all used within good online web writing today.

5 most important rules for online web writing

5 important rules to remember when dealing with web writing:

1. Web users do not read word for word through out the whole page they scan and pick out bits they need.

2. Be as concise as possible, for example get to the point straight away

3. Use lists to highlight main points about the piece.

4. Utilise chunking - putting information that is related together in a single section so that users can quickly scan through and pull out the bits they need.

5. Remember that online writing and print are totally different, different styles need to be adapted to both scenarios.

Module 3 - Website

Well i've just completed the first section of tasks for module 3. I followed the tutorial from lesson 1 to 14 and i found no real problems with it. Only thing that sometimes got annoying is that i had to keep track of of where the images where going and the folders, because if they weren't in the same folders where i specified in the html code then the images wouldn't load up. But after playing around a bit more i finally put everything in its right place.

I uploaded the website to my personal web space i have from my ISP
the address is

http://users.tpg.com.au/ad99/module3/volc/index.html

Moving on to the next section :)