Writing for the Web

There are billions of sites on the Internet, but how many of them actually get read? Many sites are set up poorly, written badly, or just not interesting, so poeple have done studies to determine what can be done about this. This Alertbox by Jakob Nielsen on Useit.com discusses many ways to make your site much more readable and user friendly. I like How he talks about getting rid of the “blah-blah” text. This is a problem I have when I turn in papers that I have written. A lot of teachers tell me to cut the fluff and write with a purpose. I found an another article from UX Booth about How fluff is driving away your viewers. Not only does this explain more about why fluff is bad, but it has no fluff itself in its writing. The author, David Legget, has clear heading for each section, puts the important things in bold texts and doesn’t put anything extra that you dont need to read. An example of a poorly written and designed website is timecube.com. The font for this website is unneccessarily large, so it makes you scroll much more than anyone would want to. It also has a lot of fluff and just unncessary writing, and on top of all that fluff, it is just poorly written. The only plus i can see for this site is that it doesnt have too many words on each line, but that is only because the font size is so large. I know that i would personally never read this whole site just because of the way it was laid out.  People may not think about these writing tips very often, but after seeing the facts and thinking about how I have been viewing websites in the past, i think that we should be more careful and more concise wiith how and what we write.