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The ideal internet-text

The use of your webpage increases:

58% - if your texts are short and clear and easy to take in at a glance. Webusers do not read on the web, they are scanning. Their eye is wandering over the screen, picking a picture here, a title, a sentence or even part of a sentence there that contain the information they are looking for. As with newspapers, often only the first paragraph and the last one are read. So, web use increases:

47% - when your texts are easily scannable. Users do especially dislike it, if they have to move taround on he screen to be able to see the whole page. But stile is important too. Webuse increases:

27% if your presentation is objective instead of sales-oriented, PR-like. Users detest marketing, gags, quack and ideology.

Webusers get nerved by:

1 Popup Boxes                                52%

2 Banners und Ads                         50%

3 Overloaded Webpages                  35%

4 slow downloads                             26%

5 difficulties, to find a specific offer    20%

Recommendations:

• What concerns links: What is written on it should be inside! Those are in fact very short titles, that show, what the visitor can expect, if he takes the effort to click. Effort may sound a bit emphatic, but if you check your statistics, you will quickly see, how little effort people undertake, to click through your offers, as well organised your navigation may be.

• Bring forward the right amount of information, prevent cognitive overload (too much to select, needle-in-haystack-syndrome), especially what concerns navigation. But do not present too little information on each click. The most favourable amount for a webpage is the one, that fills exactly one window, so some 500 signs. 

• Use words and categories that are meaningful and comprehensible for your users, s down-to-earth-language that everyone understands..

• An informal and entertaining style is more appreciated that formalities.

• Text has to be clearly structured, giving hints with inserted blocktexts, tables or graphs.

• Trustworthyness and relyability are important. They are enhanced by clear indication of origins, quotes, qualifications, motives and credibility.

• Use an objective language.

• Organise your informations carefully

• Limit the content of each paragraph to one idea.

s. How to write for the Web www.useit.com/papers/werbwriting/writing.html

Definition of Text (after Beaugrande/Dressler 1981):

A text is considered as communicative if it fulfills the following criteria:

1. Cohesion - indicating the correct grammatical connections inside the text. A structured speach with a concept and a clear dramaturgy, not a bunch of isolated thoughts!
2. Coherence: semantic-conceptional interrelation ... or more understandable - a clear und understandable speach. Especially webpages have to be conceptionally closed, total, complete, as you can't force anyone to read all the links you have present context in your personal background.
3. Intentionality: The producer of the text has an intention, an aim, that he wants to reach with the text. This is the aim of rhetorics.
4. Acceptability: Depends on the expectations and attitudes of the reader. Can be enhanced by an adapted stile (rhetorics) and the by taking into consideration the knowledge and background of the user (what is the aim of the aristotelian topics).
5. Informativity: The amount, to which the text is new for the reader. For any newspaper decisive, no necessarily for the internet. There are many informations that can stay there for years and stay used, as telefone lists (if updated), bibliographies, cooking recepies, maps ...
6. Situationality: Factors that are decisive for the relevance of the text: local, regional, worldwide - interpersonal, firm ... so, the context.
7. Intertextuality: Each text belongs to a specific category that arises specific expectations that include or exclude certain topics (scientific text, daily journal, political statement ....)