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Chris Mitchell.
Writer. Web Designer. Diver.

If the intrepid staff of the good ship .net had a penny for every time they've been asked "What makes a good web site?" they'd have enough copper coloured coinage to quit their jobs and spend the rest of their days frolicing in some idyllic foreign clime. There are millions of sites out there that think they have the answer, but the most successful ones, whatever their subject matter and however radical their site design, all subscribe to one golden rule - content is king.

It's a phrase that's become something of a mantra within the Internet industry, but there are still enough sites being built out there which manage to ignore it, blithely spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on a Web presence with lots of bells and whistles and bugger all else. Hence why there are so many sites put together by folks in their living rooms that outclass big corporate moneybag efforts, Harry Knowles 'movie rumour site Ain't It Cool News (http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com) being a classic example.

You don't have to be a brilliant Web designer to create a fantastic Web site, because what matters the most is the information you present on that site, not necessarily the way it's presented. Shockwave, Java, RealAudio and the other multitude of multimedia Web technologies have their part to play, but the core of any Web site's content is held in the text on its pages. If you produce good prose for your Web pages, you'll entertain your site's visitors and make both your site and yourself look a lot more interesting to the rest of the world.

A cunning plan

As with most things in life, the first rule of creating great content is planning. It's amazing how much time, effort and money can be expended for very little result if you're not careful (just look at the Millennium Dome) so make sure you've got a clear idea of what you want to do with your site before you start feverishly building it. Choose a subject and stick to it - people are far more likely to enjoy your site if it's a good resource about a certain topic rather than a mish-mash of freebies and borrowed content that you can find in a hundred other places on the Net already.

If you want to build in multimedia such as Shockwave, Java and so on, think carefully about how much it will add to your Web visitors enjoyment of your site. Shockwave placed on a Web page for the sake of it is unlikely to impress anyone, whereas Shockwave designed to enhance the reader's enjoyment will win you brownie points. The Shockwave Generation Game on the BBC site is a good example of a bit of Shockwave fun that adds to the text info on the page. Never foist Web multimedia on your readers - always give them the option of whether they want to see it in action or not. They may just be interested in the text info on your site and not want to see your latest Java creation, heartbreaking though that may be.

The Internet is a hungry beast, and if you've chosen to set up a site about a particular subject, the best way of keeping your readers happy is to regularly update the site, whether it be daily, weekly or monthly. You can set up a mailing list to keep readers posted on when new stuff has been added.

Once you've figured out what exactly you want to do on the Web, it's time to seek the Muse and write some fabulous prose which will have your site's visitors hungrily digesting every every page you've got.

Write on

Now, while we don't want to get all tweed jacket with leather-patched elbows on you, it's important to remember that good writing revolves around simple sentence structure, good punctuation and decent spelling. Remember that the quickest way of destroying your Web site visitors' confidence in your hard work is to have typos and paragraph-long sentences scattered throughout your prose.

Think about what you write - bang your words into a word processor first rather than straight into your Web editor, so you can ponder the best way of phrasing what you want to say without being distracted by all that HTML code nonsense. Peruse sites with distinctive writing styles to get a feel for the way you want to present your own words.

You could adopt the classic impartial relating fact style of the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk), Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk) or Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk), or go for something a bit more witty and subversive like the reporting style of UK IT news site The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk) and the tech reportage of Ninfomania (http://www.ninfomania.com). While this journalistic style won't suit every sort of site, it's worth looking at how these sites present their info with the minimum of waffle.

Perhaps you just want to keep it personal, like Dave Central's massive software archive (http://www.davecentral.com) and Chris Pirillo's excellent Windows newsletter Lockergnome. (http://www.lockergnome.com). Both these sites are superb examples of making a vast subject friendly and easily understandable by being straight up about how the site works.

Rather than pretending they're some big faceless corporate company, both Dave and Chris readily admit that they run their Web operations from home and give info about new software to their readers in the style of an informed friend having a chat. Because their prose is well-written and well-informed, and their sites regularly updated, they've both built up huge worldwide audiences who trust their software recommendations. This also makes their sites a lot more entertaining to use than, say, the excellent but somewhat anonymous download site Tucows (http://www.tucows.com). By presenting information in a pleasant, chatty, informal way, you can get readers coming back to you again and again, providing of course that you make sure you check your facts.

Whatever writing style you go for, avail yourself of the spellchecking and word count facilities of your word processing package at every opportunity. Even the best writers manage to make monumental spelling blunders, but there's really no excuse to let spelling mistakes creep into the finished text on your Web site when spellcheckers are so readily available. (If you can't afford the likes of Microsoft Word, try out StarOffice, a widely acclaimed and completely free office software suite, downloadable from http://www.sun.com). Similarly, make use of such great online facilities such as the Cambridge Dictionary (http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/elt/dictionary) to check your favourite word does actually mean what you think it means.

In brief

As mentioned above, one of the greatest merits of online reporting sites such as The Register and Ninfomania is that they keep their articles short and sharp. Because it's still not as pleasant to read off a screen as it is from a page, your site visitors will appreciate it if you cut to the chase with your prose and can keep a story to one Web page and within a couple of screens worth of scrolling.

There are some notable exceptions to this rule, such as Wired News (http://www.wired.com), Salon magazine (http://www.salon.com) and indeed, .net's own Web site (http://www.netmag.co.uk) where articles are lengthy enough to be split over several pages. In each case you'll find the reader is given the article title and brief synopsis rather being plunged straight into the article itself. This lets the reader choose which articles they want to read, so giving them the content they want rather than wading around in a mass of words.

There's a couple of simple rules of thumb to follow with the presentation of any length of text - put a line of white space between each paragraph to make your words easier to scan for the impatient surfer. Don't leave your text to run the full length of your user's screen - this makes it difficult to read. Take a look at the way Wired, Salon, the BBC and numerous others present their text, which is within a simple table cell about 400 pixels wide. This is roughly the same width of text as you'll find in a paperback book and it makes your prose look both more aesthetically pleasing and easier to read to boot.

While Times New Roman is the default font of the Net and perfectly readable, you might want to consider using the Verdana font on your Web pages, which was specially designed by those nice folk at Microsoft specifically for reading text on screens. Wired News uses Verdana to great effect, and it also gives your Web pages a clean, contemporary look. It's also best to avoid using italics (the <I> tag) on Web pages if you can, because they're not particularly legible. Finally, avoid the cardinal sin of underlining text, such as titles and captions. Underlining should only ever be used to indicate a link to another Web page, so if you want to make something stand out, use the bold tag instead. As with any other medium, the devil is in the detail when it comes to formatting text on the Net, and if you stick by these rules you'll find the combined effect makes your pages much easier to read and use.

Copycats

While the Net has begun to cause its fair share of copyright headaches for lawyers around the world, it's worth remembering that everything that gets uploaded to a Web page is automatically the copyright of the creator. This doesn't have to be explicitly asserted anywhere on the site, although it's more professional to do so. This means that all your work is protected by copyright law, as is every other site. Don't be tempted to "borrow" content from other sites just because it's as easy as cutting and pasting the info from their Web page to yours. It's illegal, immoral and it could land you in big trouble if the company concerned have Rottweiler-like lawyers. (Is there any other kind?).

Of course, if you find people have been pilfering content from your Web pages, you may not have a crack squad of legal eagles ready to descend upon them. No matter - send them a polite but firm email asking them to cease and desist and they'll probably comply. If that doesn't work, then it's worth contacting .net about the issue, as the likelihood of bad press should provide enough clout to solve the problem.

The final word

As you'll have gathered, writing for the Web is a skill that needs to be mastered just as much as the art of building Web sites. Thankfully there isn't as steep a learning curve with writing as there is with Web design, because we all do it anyway, and rather than having to wrestle with arcane code commands, much of the essence of good writing is common sense. You don't have to become the next Booker Prize winner to write good prose for your Web site, just bear in mind the idiosyncrasies of the medium you're working with.

While mastering Web writing might not seem as exciting as playing around with the latest Web site building widgets, it's certainly the more important skill in terms of producing a site that people will enjoy and to which they'll return. A collection of well-written text pages will get far more attention than a rag-tag collection of Web gizmos.