{"id":1468,"date":"2009-10-02T22:40:51","date_gmt":"2009-10-03T02:40:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/conference.journalists.org\/2009conference\/?p=1468"},"modified":"2009-10-02T22:40:51","modified_gmt":"2009-10-03T02:40:51","slug":"text-still-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ona09.journalists.org\/2009\/10\/02\/text-still-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"Text still rules"},"content":{"rendered":"

Text by Anna Bloom
\nVideo by Martin Ricard<\/p>\n

Words drive users of the Web, say the Internet’s wordsmiths. Bury the words in dense paragraphs or between a maze of images and users will grow impatient and change course, continuing their quest for information elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\"final-final_new\"“Think of your Web audience as lazy, selfish and ruthless,” said Michael Gold, West Gold Editorial<\/a> principal. “Web audiences are on a mission\u2014they’re task-oriented.”<\/p>\n

Gold was one of four speakers headlining “Yep, Text Still Matters,” an ONA09 discussion devoted to the craft of writing for the web.<\/p>\n

Get Over Your Print Past<\/strong><\/p>\n

Writing for the Internet requires a clear, concise <\/strong>style with lots of sub headlines<\/strong> and bullet points<\/strong> and highlighting of key terms, said the panelists.<\/p>\n

Gold, who began his career in print, was unsentimental about shaking the ways of newspapers and magazines.<\/p>\n

“Get over it,” he told the audience. “You have to leave go of all the artifacts of print and move on.”<\/p>\n

Text matters on the Web<\/a> from Martin Ricard<\/a> on Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Text still matters on the Web<\/a> from Online News Association<\/a> on Vimeo<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The F Shape<\/strong><\/p>\n

If Internet users can’t find what they’re looking for, they will move on, said panelist Hoa Loranger, director of Nielsen Norman Group<\/a> and author of “Prioritizing Web Usability.”<\/p>\n

Users spend, on average, 25 seconds on a home page and only 47 seconds\u00a0on secondary pages, according to her studies. This means writers and designers need to make a huge impact on a user immediately.\u00a0“The first two words, the first two paragraphs, the first twos of things are very important for the Web,” Loranger said.<\/p>\n

By way of example, Loranger directed the room’s attention to heat maps that tracked the gaze of an average user on a site. Large blobs of red peppered the map at the beginnings of paragraphs, then smaller dots marked up the rest in an “F” formation.<\/p>\n

Subconsciously, people will skip the items they aren’t looking for and this often includes pictures<\/strong> that might look like glossy advertisements. Pictures can often become an obstacle course to the information a user is seeking, Loranger said. People tend to focus on words.<\/p>\n

Take Out the Scalpel<\/strong><\/p>\n

But a wall of text is not the answer, the panelists said. Web writers need to use proper “Web format technique” to increase visibility, they said.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

“More clarity and more engagement? Shouldn\u2019t we be doing that anyway?” Gold said. “Think of writing for the human searchers.”<\/p>\n

Gold presented before and after makeovers of articles posted on CooksIllustrated.com and nytimes.com to illustrate how to “webify” content to make it scanner-friendly.<\/strong> In Gold\u2019s versions, the information remained the same, but shorter with bullet points and subheads. Images were also demoted from the top of the page to the bottom.<\/p>\n

“Take out that editor scalpel and make it shorter,” he said. “That’s life or death stuff.”<\/p>\n

A New Guide<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yahoo! Senior Editorial Director Christopher Barr echoed Gold’s remarks, adding a number of technical rules of his own.<\/p>\n