COM271, Week 11

Writing for the Web

Syllabus | Table of Pages | Assignments | References and Useful Links

The World Wide Web is familiar to all of us. As a medium for communication, it is without par for its usefulness in commerce, personal communication, education, and entertainment. Yet the web as we know it—a mix of text , images, and multimedia—has only existed relatively recently, since the first graphical browsers came on line in 1992; for the current generation of undergraduates, there has always been a web. Augmented by steadily decreasing prices and increasing computer power in the home computer industry, the web is ubiquitous; indeed, it is difficult to imagine the world before the web.

For writers of scientific and technical material, there are myriad opportunities to write for publication to the web. Each of the billions of pages posted on servers, located all around the world, has a potential readership unimagined in prior human history. So what are you waiting for? The planet is waiting to hear from you.

Technology for Producing Web Pages

As we sit at our computers, we interact with other computers on the web, all connected by the electronic internet. We do not need to know how it works; we merely acknowledge that it does. We don't need to know much to get started, just enough to start a browser, to click a mouse, or to type in a web address, something millions have learned to do without ever taking a single course of instruction. But here, we are speaking as though the world of the web were all about consuming web pages.

There is, of course, another side of the web, the world of producing web pages, and it isn't that difficult to become a producer (web developer). You already have all of the tools that you need to get started

• The basics of client-side, static web pages: The web connects users, each working on a client computer that runs a browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Safari are most common), each client connecting to an individual server computer, where web pages are stored and made accessible (served). To produce a page, a web developer uses a computer to create a page, sending it to the server as a file.
  • html: You have been studying how web pages consist of text, images, and multimedia files (e.g., flash movies or audio clips), held together by hypertext markup language, html. Html provides structure for the content, marking, for example, text that is meant to be a header, or other text that is meant to be a paragraph. You now know how to create web pages text files. You are well on your way.
  • css: You also have an advanced competency and skill set in CSS, the way that text or other page content is displayed is determined by a second language. Your pages are compact, stylish, and with everything is just the right place, fonts perfect, racing stripes for just the perfect little effects. You rock, CSS zen master!
  • javascript: If the page has dynamic effects (if you role the mouse pointer over a link, a menu appears to drop down) or client-side programming (your browser is used to check whether required fields in a form have been filled in) require still a third language, javascript. You have seen how this is a little more demanding, but you've waded through the fundamentals and have a good introduction to web programming. You are ready to continue learning scripts on your own.
• More advanced, server-side pages where the content of the page comes from databases: For some sites, there is a lot of information, so much that it makes little sense to make as many web pages as it would take to respond to all possible decisions made by a user (think Amazon or LLBean). To produce web pages at this level requires a bit more
  • Server-side scripting: An html form can be used to send information to the server, in the form of name and value pairs (e.g., firstname:John or item_number_selected:19). This information can be used to develop databases (a record for the customer with the first name of John who ordered item number 19) or to retrieve information (John needs a page that displays pictures and text that tell about item number 19). There are two basic approaches to programming the server to do this work. One approach, written by the Microsoft corporation, uses languages ASP (Active Server Pages) or VBScript (Visual Basic Script) or more elaborate collections of functional code (ASP.NET) and SQL Server databases (or the older Access database). The other, written by various authors under a system of open source code, used PHP (don't ask) and MySQL databases.
  • Data bases: Databases allow storage of text, numbers, and other computer objects in a series of tables with rows and columns of data. The tables break down information into useful units ("this is a table of custormers, their addresses, etc., and this is a table of products, their item numbers, descriptions, pictures, prices, etc.") The rows and columns (also called fields) have meaning, such as "this row is a record of John's order for item 19 on January 1....", where the information identifying John is stored in a field called first_name, etc. To select a record, or to add, modify, or delete records in a database table requires a connection between the server web page (written in PHP or ASP) and instructions written in SQL (structured query language) (e.g., Select first_name From tblCustomers Where first_name="John"). None of this is hard, but it takes some time to learn.

If you are interested in learning more about producing web pages, see COM271. If you want to learn more about web pages that use PHP and MySQL databases, see COM372. Both courses are taught by Dr. Logan.

Writing for the Web

Although the web is an ubiquitous and relatively cheap method for all kinds of writing, there are relatively few things written about writing for the web (even on the web!). The best texts for thinking about web writing from the perspective of meeting audience needs are probably the older (1999) Designing Web Usability, by Jakob Nielsen, or the more recent (2007) Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works, by Janice Redish.

Both Nielsen and Redish remind us that the web reader is driven by a search for content, and that web pages should be designed for access to that content. The term user is common, and useful in differentiating between people as they seek content for particular purposes on the web from the same people as they consume writing for leisure or for uses that are not as characteristically driven and impatient as the reading experience typically is on the web.

Mindful of the web user, Nielsen suggests three guidelines for writing

Based on studies of people using the web, Nielsen advises, "Keep your text short."

Perhaps the best illustration of the concise writing that Nielsen urges us to produce is his table analyzing how three techniques can improve user ratings of text. The three techniques are to use concise text, to use a scannable layout, and to adopt objective language. Here is Nielsen's table:

References

• Jakob Nielsen. 1999. Designing Web Usability. Peachpit Press. 432 p.
• Janice Redish. 2007. Letting Go of the Words: Writing web Content that Works. Morgan Kaufmann. 365 p.