What Makes Good Webwriting?

What Makes Good Webwriting?
A reader wrote the other day to ask my opinion: What did I consider good examples of writing on the web? Well, I confess I couldn't leap up with a dozen examples on the tip of my tongue. Examples of bad writing, however, are easy to come by. On my blog H5N1, I often excerpt text from news stories, government websites, and technical sources. All too often, I have to...

A reader wrote the other day to ask my opinion: What did I consider good examples of writing on the web?

Well, I confess I couldn't leap up with a dozen examples on the tip of my tongue. Examples of bad writing, however, are easy to come by. On my blog H5N1, I often excerpt text from news stories, government websites, and technical sources. All too often, I have to tinker with the text to make it readable.

For example, some scientific abstracts are solid blocks of text, 200 or 300 words long. I can't edit them, but I can re-paragraph them to make them easier to read.

News reports are often more reader-friendly, full of one-sentence paragraphs. The sentences, however, may run to 40 or more words—and it's often the first paragraph that tries to create an "abstract" of the whole story. (When I excerpt the text anyway, I usually apologize for the style.)

In other cases, the text may be concise and well-paragraphed, but appallingly displayed. Some poor souls are still stuck in 1996, proudly publishing white text sprawled across a black background clear across the screen.

Others have crisp black text on a white background. But the lines run to 15 or 20 words. Here's an example from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, which is OK but could be much better with shorter lines. He hasn't changed his format in years, and he should have.

Subheads Help
Subheads can break up the text still more and provide landmarks. Too many webwriters neglect this simple aid to readers.

Of course, sometimes a text is on a website only to be printed off and read on paper. In that case, it just has to be readable when printed.

You're welcome to visit H5N1 and my other blogs to see how I try to live by my own rules.

Judge the Top Blogs on Their Writing!
But here's another suggestion. Visit Technorati: Popular Blogs and see what you think of the writing on some of the top sites.

Does Engadget's shimmering prose enshrine it as #1 blog? Is Michelle Malkin (#11)a better webwriter than Guy Kawasaki(#15)?

Or are other factors at work in these high-traffic, high-impact sites? I'd love to hear your comments.

Naming Your Blog
Michael Weiss at Slate has an entertaining item: Don't drink the balloon juice: Good, bad, and ugly things to name your blog. He discusses mostly American political blogs, but it's actually a pretty serious question: What's the best thing to name your site? As a compulsive multiple blogger, I have to answer the question more often than I care to admit. Most of my sites have fairly flat-footed self-descriptive titles,...

Michael Weiss at Slate has an entertaining item: Don't drink the balloon juice: Good, bad, and ugly things to name your blog.

He discusses mostly American political blogs, but it's actually a pretty serious question: What's the best thing to name your site? As a compulsive multiple blogger, I have to answer the question more often than I care to admit.

Most of my sites have fairly flat-footed self-descriptive titles, like this one and Writing Fiction. When I started blogging avian flu, H5N1 was also pretty self-descriptive, but set slightly apart from other blogs that played variations on "bird flu," "avian influenza," and so on.

Without realizing what I was doing, I picked names that people tend to Google. Type "writing fiction" into Google Advanced search and my site comes up first out of a million hits. "Writing for the Web" is #7 out of 634,000. And "h5n1" is #5 out of 7,870,000 hits.

In a course blog, where only my students are likely to visit, I may use a flat-footed name or a cute one—in a course on storytelling for media, the blog is Raconteur. But I'm just as comfortable with a course blog named for the room the class meets in, like Cedar 224.

For a blog that I co-author with a teacher in China, the name is English Corner, a reference most Chinese students will understand because every campus and town has an "English corner" where students gather to practice their English on one another—and any native English speakers who wander by.

Now I'm getting interested in climate change, and recently started Homage to Arrhenius, an allusion to the Swedish scientist who first developed the theory about CO² as a greenhouse gas, back in the 1890s. This may be a little too cute.

And for another blog, created as a journal for the second edition of one of my books, I've chosen the flat-footed name Pioneers...since the book is titled Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia.

I'd be curious to know how bloggers visiting here chose the names for their sites. And can you point to any blogs that are either very well named, or horribly misnamed?

WordPress 2.1 is Ready
Just read from Teli’s WordPress Niche Blog that WordPress 2.1 is out for download. One of the important changes is in this version is that now it requires MySQL 4. Which means I have to upgrade my servers in order to test drive it. Download WordPress 2.1.

Just read from Teli’s WordPress Niche Blog that WordPress 2.1 is out for download. One of the important changes is in this version is that now it requires MySQL 4. Which means I have to upgrade my servers in order to test drive it.

Download WordPress 2.1.

Where is Bo?
First of all, I’d like to say happy new year to you. I know I haven’t shared anything with you for a while. I hope you are still reading this blog, because I’m going to share even more niche marketing stuff with you in 2007. I was struggling with coming up with [...]

First of all, I’d like to say happy new year to you. I know I haven’t shared anything with you for a while. I hope you are still reading this blog, because I’m going to share even more niche marketing stuff with you in 2007. I was struggling with coming up with the blog content because I noticed that what my readers need is not “techniques” but rather, motivation and inspiration. I’ve tried to do both, and was kinda lost, to be honest. So, in 2007, I will make case studies and share the experience with you. I hope this will motivate you and inspire you to go after the things you desired to achieve.

Anyway, the main reason why I wasn’t able to come near the PC was that I’m in the progress of moving to a new house. To be more exact, we are moving back to one of my investment houses. We are going to sell the house we are currently living and move back to the one which has a big basement.

The reason for this move is to make a physical office for my online business company. Marketing Syndrome Inc. will have its physical office at a basement of my house :) Currently, I’m busy doing the renovation of the house and the office. It’s about 10 minutes from my current house and I’m making a trip daily to do some work. I have to hire contractors for some tasks, but I’m doing the most of the work myself. Ah! I know what you are thinking! Outsource! well, no. I’m doing it because I love doing house renovation with my wife. It’s our only hobby that we both enjoy doing :)

So, here is what I’m up to. If your goal is to earn a full-time income from niche marketing, working from home, make sure to come back to my blog. Because you will learn everything about it from this blog. I have a lot to share with you in this field and I barely scratched the surface. I haven’t share with you anything about my main affiliate campaigns that bring me the major portion of my income. You will read all about it for free in 2007.

I’m also exploring new ways to bring passive income online consistently, so I will be sharing this with you also. The software I’m currently exploring is called “Build A Niche Store“, which is believe to be a very effective tool for niche marketers. I will be testing this software thoroughly in January and February. So expect to hear more about it in the next posts.

New Blog Coming
I’ve decided to start a new blog on niche marketing. It will be hosted on the same domain. I didn’t want to mess-up current search engine rankings and all, but my current blog is out-dated and most of the information shared here are also outdated. I need a platform where I can [...]

I’ve decided to start a new blog on niche marketing. It will be hosted on the same domain. I didn’t want to mess-up current search engine rankings and all, but my current blog is out-dated and most of the information shared here are also outdated. I need a platform where I can easily update old content as well. WordPress 2.1 will be my choice (again) and will use better category system so that you find information more easily.

Also, I’m going to be moving the current mailing system to aweber, a long delayed decision on this. So bear with me during the transition time.

Bo

Political Bloggers as Webwriters: I
I would post here more often if I weren't such a political-blog addict. But I'm going to try to exploit this vice by posting an occasional critique of political blogs as examples of webwriting. After all, some of these blogs attract enough visitors to generate ad revenue, so they must be doing something right. Or are they? So I'll start this series with Hugh Hewitt's blog. Hewitt is an American...

I would post here more often if I weren't such a political-blog addict. But I'm going to try to exploit this vice by posting an occasional critique of political blogs as examples of webwriting. After all, some of these blogs attract enough visitors to generate ad revenue, so they must be doing something right. Or are they?

So I'll start this series with Hugh Hewitt's blog. Hewitt is an American right-wing commentator, and he shares the blog with several other writers of similar persuasion. Their politics aren't very attractive to me as a Canadian centre-leftist (which puts me, in American terms, out there somewhere beyond the Nepalese Maoists). But that's not the point.

An Attractive Layout
In its general layout, Hewitt's site is very attractive: an off-white background for black sans serif text, with colour used for headlines. Hewitt and his associate Dean Barnett write in (mostly) short paragraphs with (mostly) short sentences, and they break up their text with blank spaces between paragraphs and short quotes that stand out clearly from the main text.

Another poster, going by the name of Generalissimo, is much less effective in basic post design. The first paragraph of the post I've linked to is 19 lines long. Most of the sentences within that great block of text are individually short, concise, and readable—but they're buried alive. Better to break the text up into three or even four paragraphs.

Generalissimo's difficulties are compounded by the basic column width of posts, which allows lines that average around 15 words long. This is tolerable (barely) in paragraphs of 6 or 7 lines, but the whole site would benefit from a narrower text column.

That's because most readers are more comfortable with a line of 10 to 12 words. It's easier to track back and down to the next line.

Hypertext and Eye Candy
The Hewitt site uses links well. Links either have blurbs or are self-describing, and they don't distract from reading the text. Webwriting depends on orientation/information/action, and the site design is excellent on offering options for action: email the post, print it, take action, comment, or trackback.

On orientation, the site could improve. Navigation is a problem unless you're only there to read the latest posts. Some posts are long and take forever to scroll through, so it's hard to see what else is new on the site. Providing a click-through to a new page would permit putting more headlines on a single screen. Subheads, like the ones in this post, would also help to break up long posts and tell readers what to expect.

The text dominates a wide column on the left, with ads and other links in the narrow right-hand columns. The ads stand out fairly well (they'd better), but the links to archives and sympathetic blogs are hard to find and hard to read with blue text on a dark-grey background.

Graphics can certainly enliven a text-rich site, but a good computer-graphics person needs to have a quiet talk with the Hewitt posters. Site graphics tend to be too big (see the "stupidity meter"). A flyer for Mitt Romney's Iowa campaign is held up as "a nice piece of mail" when it's atrociously ugly.

Readability
I haven't run any of the Hewitt site text through Readability.info, but I'd expect it to come through very well. As mentioned, most sentences are short, punchy, and full of single-syllable words. Readability would improve still more with fewer monster paragraphs.

No doubt the site attracts thousands of readers a day, most of whom will patiently read much of what they find. The site is preaching to a particular choir, so readers will put up with design and writing flaws for the sake of the message.

Still, a site's fervent fans deserve the happiest experience the writers can provide. Even the idly curious (and the actively hostile) will recognize when a site shows respect for them by making the material attractive and accessible. This site is partway there, but could improve with a more navigable design and tight editorial consistency.

So as an example of webwriting, I'll give the Hewitt site a B.

Biz Tips Blog Featured by Typepad: Congratulations, Denise
Denise's Biz Tips Blog is featured by Typepad this week. I have the best partner in the world, but to sing her praises almost seems a little incestuous... But Typepad, the big blogging platform provider, gave well-deserved recognition yesterday to...

Please Update RSS FEED!
It’s here now, my new blog is ready. Please update your RSS feed to… http://feeds.feedburner.com/marketingsyndrome New blog is located at: http://www.marketingsyndrome.com/blog/ See you there!

It’s here now, my new blog is ready.

Please update your RSS feed to…

http://feeds.feedburner.com/marketingsyndrome

New blog is located at:

http://www.marketingsyndrome.com/blog/

See you there!

Marketing Online Writing
I've been happily writing for The Tyee for several years. It's a lively online magazine with a focus on British Columbia but with plenty of attention to the rest of the world. The Tyee is now trying a little viral marketing to attract more readers: Tyee: Join Us! I'd be interested to hear your reactions to this approach. The Tyee has also published a survey of Independent Media: Vibrant and...

I've been happily writing for The Tyee for several years. It's a lively online magazine with a focus on British Columbia but with plenty of attention to the rest of the world. The Tyee is now trying a little viral marketing to attract more readers: Tyee: Join Us! I'd be interested to hear your reactions to this approach.

The Tyee has also published a survey of Independent Media: Vibrant and Growing.

By the way, I've just published a piece on avian flu in The Tyee.

I'd love to hear about other good online magazines, especially in Europe, Asia, and Latin America—in any language.

YPN vs Adsense
David at his blog posted an interesting findings on YPN vs Adsense. He switched to YPN from Adsense for 10 days and shared his results with a screenshot. Very interesting read, please check it out. Making Money with YPN

David at his blog posted an interesting findings on YPN vs Adsense. He switched to YPN from Adsense for 10 days and shared his results with a screenshot.

Very interesting read, please check it out.

Making Money with YPN

Good Manners? On the Web?
Via the New York Times: A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs. Excerpt: Is it too late to bring civility to the Web? The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse. Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a...

Via the New York Times: A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs. Excerpt:

Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?

The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

A recent outbreak of antagonism among several prominent bloggers “gives us an opportunity to change the level of expectations that people have about what’s acceptable online,” said Mr. O’Reilly, who posted the preliminary recommendations last week on his company blog (radar.oreilly.com).

Mr. Wales then put the proposed guidelines on his company’s site (blogging.wikia.com), and is now soliciting comments in the hope of creating consensus around what constitutes civil behavior online.

Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Wales talk about creating several sets of guidelines for conduct and seals of approval represented by logos. For example, anonymous writing might be acceptable in one set; in another, it would be discouraged. Under a third set of guidelines, bloggers would pledge to get a second source for any gossip or breaking news they write about.

Bloggers could then pick a set of principles and post the corresponding badge on their page, to indicate to readers what kind of behavior and dialogue they will engage in and tolerate. The whole system would be voluntary, relying on the community to police itself. “If it’s a carefully constructed set of principles, it could carry a lot of weight even if not everyone agrees,” Mr. Wales said.

Yes, it's extremely nasty out there. I've been lucky, in my own blogging, to escape the kind of behaviour described in the Times article. But I don't know how effective a "code of conduct" would be. What's your opinion—especially if you live outside North America?