Dennis Meredith PHOTO BY JIM WALLACE, DUKE U. PHOTOGRAPHY

PIO FORUM

by Dennis Meredith

Grabbing Readers with Web-Friendly Text

With the advent of the Web, PIOs have a golden opportunity to make news releases and features much more attractive and useful to readers. By using good Web-writing techniques, Web-friendly layout, hypertext, and multimedia, we can, in fact, outshine our media colleagues, turning our stories into rich and involving information sources. For example, few media really take advantage of the wealth of information on the Web to enrich their stories with links to resources on other sites.

The benefits to institutions could be considerable. Imagine, for example, how much more engaging a prospective student would find a university news release if the Web version offered links to other interesting sites. I strongly suspect that prospective student would come away with a more favorable impression of the university as a teaching institution—particularly important given that students use Web sites to make some key decisions about which colleges to consider.

Also, a rich, useful collection of links adds value for journalists accessing a news release or feature, and increases its “shelf life” as a source of information.

Most of us (including myself!) simply slap news releases and articles up on the Web with little adjustment for the Web as a medium. So, my PIO’s New Year’s Resolution will be to pay more attention to the journalistic requirements of the Web when preparing news releases for posting.

The following are tips from experts on good Web writing and layout together with a list of resources, including the site of Web guru Jakob Nielsen, an article by him on usability, and a link to the site for an excellent book on Web writing, Hot Text: Web Writing That Works. I’ve also included URLs of science information sites that can provide authoritative link resources for your news releases.

The basic imperative among Web writers is to produce text that can be scanned, not just read. As we all well know, it’s not nearly as convenient to read relatively fuzzy computer-displayed text, hunched over a monitor, as it is to read crisp print on a page, kicked back in an easy chair. So, among the rules of Web journalism:

• Write especially tight, informative headlines that tell the reader what’s in the story.
• Use informative subheads and bulleted lists to “chunk” the story for readers.
• Tighten text as much as possible to eliminate verbiage.
• Relegate less important detail to sidebars linked off the main story.
• Paragraph frequently to give “landmarks” to the eye.
• Use outbound hypertext links to add richness and credibility to the story.

There are some caveats with regard to this last tip. Web experts caution that hyperlinks should not be crowded into online text, to avoid interrupting the text flow. Rather, they should be used for emphasis and to enrich the content of a story.

Besides links to reference resources, you can also retroactively add links to media stories that a news release has spawned. Of course, links to media stories should be done with the understanding that many media, especially newspapers, render links inoperable after a while, placing the material in a fee-paid area. However, many excellent media, including Scientific American, do not. For significant media stories that become fee-paid, you could negotiate with the newspaper or magazine for rights to post the stories on your site, and link to them from the release.

Some writers express worry that outbound links will take readers away from the site, never to return. However, Web experts assert that readers will much more likely explore such links and return to the original site; and that they will invariably be more likely to use that site in the future, since they’ve found it a useful resource.

Of course, in addition to useful outbound links, you should include internal links to bios; relevant departmental, school, or other internal sites; earlier articles on the subject, and related articles.

An alternative to integrating Web links into the text itself is to provide a list of useful links in a sidebar. When incorporating sidebars, it’s a good idea to design the page so that the links appear alongside the article near the top, making them visible on the opening screen. Such placement ensures that readers will be aware of the additional content from the outset and can access it as they wish.

Multimedia—images, audio, video, and animations—can be extremely important to telling science and engineering stories, and I plan to cover the techniques for effective multimedia in a future column.

Meanwhile, check out particularly good Web science-magazine sites, such as Vanderbilt’s Exploration magazine and The Why Files, to get an idea of how effective Web writing and layout can grabreaders.

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Dennis Meredith is assistant v. p. of news and communications at Duke University. He can be reached at dennis.meredith@duke.edu or 919-681-8054. He welcomes comments and topic suggestions for future columns.