The one thing you never want to see in your web pages—whether on your blog, your wiki, or your own website—are grey pages with nothing but text: no links, no headlines, no images.

People like to scan and skim on the web. This is no surprise. As web content strategist Ginny Redish likes to say in her book, Letting Go of the Words. We don’t read, we hunt. If we do not think your page offers the information we want, we move on. Quickly.

Or think about the times you have jumped on your favorite news site (e.g., CNN, ESPN, Wired, etc.). Much like when reading newspapers, the first thing most readers do is skim the headlines looking for something to catch their interest. Readers do the same thing when they visit a blog that they haven’t been to before. As Copyblogger points out: “Your headline is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader. Without a compelling promise that turns a browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not even exist. . . . On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.”

Editors of professional news publications and serious bloggers know this, and they typically spend significant amounts of time coming up with the right headline to attract readers. Whether you are keeping your own weblog, creating an information page for a client, working on a wiki page, or building a personal portfolio website, you’ll need to take some time, too, to create page titles, headings, and subheaders that invite your reader to explore and understand the content you have created.

Subheaders and Lists

In addition to page titles and major page headlines, you also want to break up your text with subheaders. Nothing you put on the web should look like the papers you turn in to professors. Nothing says “move on without reading” to web users like grey blocks of text. Ginny Redish recommends that you think of your subheaders as a conversation that you are having with your user. People come to your pages with questions. Use your subheaders to answer those questions.

Here is a page from the website of the English Department at SUNY New Paltz about the careers that students who graduate with English majors go on to pursue. Note that all of the subheaders and most of the formatting have been removed:

 

CAREERS IN ENGLISH Sample Job Titles (some of the following titles may require additional education) Grant Writer, Editor, Journalist, Casting Director, Fundraising Coordinator, Advertising Copy writer, Speechwriter, Screenwriter, Corporate Librarian, Admissions Representative, Television Reporter and Critic Our Graduates…Where Are They Now? Alumni who graduated in the past 1 to 5 years have obtained employment as: Assistant Medical Librarian, New York College of Podiatric Medicine, Head Writer, Sensations Press, Production Manager for Custom Publishing and Reprints, Macmillan Learning, Copywriter and Writer, Mystique Boutique NYC, Search Engine Optimization Specialist, Edible Arrangements Alumni who graduated in the past 6 to 10 years have obtained employment as: Events and Marketing Manager, New York Institute of Technology ‐ Auditorium on Broadway, Academic Success Coach, Connors Family Learning Center.

 

How much time would you be willing to invest searching for information about a future career that interested you? 

Don’t Forget Lists

Lists, both numbered and bulleted lists, are another form of subheaders in that they make the underlying structure of your content visible to your readers. A good list can make clear the steps in a process, the advantages of an option, or the requirements of a program.

Now, here is that information from the SUNY New Paltz English Department’s website, formatted with subheaders and bullet points. Notice how the information is broken up into chunks by using subheaders and bulleted lists. Clearly, this text is much easier to read than the paragraph above:

Screenshot from the SUNY New Paltz English Department website.

 

WEB WRITING STYLE GUIDE

Version 1.0, June 2011

Edited by Matt Barton, James Kalmbach, and Charles Lowe