Excellent online copywriting needs to adhere to two rules: first, it must follow the conventions of good writing in general, and second, it must adopt the special principles of writing for the web.
This section spells out these sets of rules, and provides guidelines for writing for your website, email newsletter and blog. Always remember that your writing must be suited to your target market, especially in your level of formality and use of slang or jargon. When in doubt, keep it polite and simple.
General principles of good writing Start with a plan. Before you begin writing, take some time to plan exactly what you want to say and what purpose you want to achieve with your writing. Consider how you want to present your information – should it be a list, a blog article, a table or maybe even an image instead of text? Keep your goal in mind as you write. Keep it simple. Simple writing means short sentences, clear and direct phrasing and avoiding complex words or jargon. Use as few words as possible to bring your point across, and avoid padding your writing with unnecessary adjectives.
• Wrong: Our very exciting new service will completely and totally overhaul the way you understand and think about web design, CSS, CM S and customer subscription solutions.
• Right: Our new service will change the way you look at all aspects of web development. Be active, not passive. Wherever possible, write your copy using an active voice rather than a passive one.
• Passive: A large range of services is offered by our company to meet your needs.
• Active: We offer a large range of services to meet your needs.
Write for readability. Readability is a word that means “ease of reading”. There are many ways to make your text easier to understand. Use bolding or italics to highlight important words, short paragraphs to keep your ideas separate, bullet points to outline important details and subheadings to give your text structure. Do not write whole words or paragraphs in capital letters – this is the equivalent of shouting online and has the same negative reaction. Most web readers scan text, which means they run their eyes over it quickly without absorbing everything. Using these tricks will make your text more scannable and will make sure the crucial things stand out.
Wrong: Our product has many features, like helping you to manage your digital documents, keep a list of your online contacts, archive your emails and manage your diary.
• Right: Our product features:
o Manage your digital documents
o Store online contacts
o Archive emails
o Manage your calendar
Be consistent. Every aspect of your brand should be consistent, and this is especially important for your writing. Always make sure that your written communications use the same terms, vocabulary, spelling, tone and level of complexity, not to mention the small but vital stylistic elements. Though you will use different techniques for you website, blog and other channels, all your writing should feel that it comes from the same source. An excellent way of achieving this is to create a style guide
for your brand. A style guide specifies the standard terms, spelling and so on for your brand-related writing – for example, do you spell the word “internet” with a capital or lower case “i”? You can consult an editor to help you construct one, or you can download this detailed guide: www.techwr-l.com/files/examplestyleguide. pdf (note that it refers to US conventions). The Yahoo Style Guide is also an excellent starting resource: styleguide.yahoo.com.