Writing for the Internet

Your Internet readers want to know a bit about you. They like to feel they "know" you. This means you will be writing in the first person. Give your opinions. Write in your own voice. Remember to answer the five questions: Who, what , when, where, and why. If you do this your readers may stick around for more details.

Brevity and pace count for a lot too. Net users have so many other options online. They could easily click their way to another online site. Your job is to hook them and hook them fast. Remember, the screen is somewhat small for some people and the text can be small as well. I know for a fact, I do not like to have scroll excessively to read a story/article. Sometimes I feel like if I have to scroll one more time I'm going to scream. Well, I don't want my readers feeling like that. Brevity is also important to keep download times short as well (we all know we don't want our readers twiddling their thumbs or leaving the site because they are waiting too long) The way to keep this to a minimum is to watch out for large images, video, and large sound files.

My last important topic about writing for the Internet has to do with links. I don't know how many times I have clicked on a link on some site only to find it is a dead link. (the link doesn't work, or it goes to a page that doesn't exist anymore) I try to check my links often so people don't have this problem from links on any of my pages.