Writing for the web is not the same as writing for print
It’s kind of obvious when you think about how you read a book, a brochure, a magazine and a website: You use different reading techniques for different media.
I came across this post on BestBizCom, which is an interesting site, which discusses printed brochures and ends with “Just be sure to put the PDF up on your site, so you’re covered on all fronts!”
The reality is that most web users hate PDFs:
- If they don’t have Adobe’s reader, they have to download it. A big distraction.
- Unless they are used to it, they find the change in the UI from browser to Acrobat very confusing.
- There are weird delays in downloading the content. Most web pages should download in under 10s on the slowest connection. PDFs almost never manage that.
- PDFs are hard to navigate for the average user.
I was at a conference a few weeks ago where someone told me that their boss insisted that all the content on their website, except the home page, was delivered in PDF format. What a disaster!
Then we come to the question of how to write for the web. Basically, it’s not the same as writing for print media. It needs to be:
- Shorter by about 50 per cent compared to print
- Free of hype or marketing polyfiller
- Free of long words and jargon
- Written for scanning: bullets, highlighting, shorter paragraphs
- In my opinion, left justified not fully justified down both margins
George wrote:
I totally agree! PDFs on the web are most annoying - Acrobat takes ages to start even on the fastest computer, displays an annoying logo splash screen and tends to crash firefox. Every time I accidentally click on a PDF link from google I instantly regret it, but I have already lost control, because for the 10 or more seconds you write about the browser does not respond to anything.
I’m not sure if I’m the average user, but if you don’t want to annoy the likes of me do not put PDFs on your pages, or if you do, mark them clearly as PDF, so I only go there as a last resort.
I suppose what’s even worse is a Word document…
Posted on 06-Jun-06 at 7:48 pm | Permalink
Matthew Stibbe wrote:
You can stop the Firefox crashing when you open a PDF and generally speed up Acobat by following the tips on this page: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Adobe_Reader. However, the fact that you need to get all geeky on it to make it usable underlines how irritating PDFs are!
Posted on 07-Jun-06 at 9:39 am | Permalink
Bad Language / Want a good website, on time? Prioritise content. wrote:
[...] Writing for the web is not the same as writing for print. In general, write to be scanned not read and reduce the word count by 50 per cent. And don’t use PDFs for core content. [...]
Posted on 09-Aug-06 at 8:53 am | Permalink
Bad Language / How to make money writing for the web wrote:
[...] forget it - is that writing for the web is not the same as writing for print. Here are some tips: Avoid PDFs, shorter by about 50 per cent compared to print, free of hype or marketing polyfiller, free of long [...]
Posted on 13-May-08 at 1:39 pm | Permalink