Content

"Content" is the words or information on your page.

Excellent web content is succinct and scannable. Reading on the web is similar to reading a comic book or playing cards: surfers scan the material for relevance and seize on relevant objects. To facilitate this style of writing use headings to separate ideas and bulleted text to emphasize points. Write short scannable paragraphs between the subject headings and bullets. Make use of hypertext links to give definitions and to link to other projects.  

Put content in its place

Divide your content with bullets and subject headings, breaking the text into small digestible chunks. Create subject headings that are keywords or a short phrase to describe sections. Do not use sweet or cute ones as they often annoy readers. 

Be specific when creating headings. Call a spade a "tool for digging in the ground, with a metal blade and wooden handle" if that is what you mean. Though succinct, "Project Groups 1, 2, 3" or "Ms. Smith's Class" are bad headings: surfers do not know the participants of Groups 1, 2, 3 and if there are two Ms Smiths, annoyed parents will call the teachers at home. "Ms. Smith's Grade Ten History Project" is a little better; I hope that the parents-and students-know their teachers' names by June. 

For a school heritage project that involves one class, separate by student and give the title of the project. For more than one class, separate by teacher, student and title of project. Place the first names in alphabetical order, last initial and title of the essay, if more than one student has the same last initial. 

For example: 

2001: Social Studies 10A (Ms. Smith) Final Assignments: 

• Jamil K.: Japanese World War II Internment at Taber, Alberta

• Karen J.: The Woo Family: A Chinese-Canadian Family Biography

• Krista J.: Oral History Interviews with Members of the Woo Family Association

• Tracy R.: Immigration to Alberta: A Photo Essay

• Yyyyy¹ : Epidemics in Canada: Mass Immunizations

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Add captions to your pictures

Unlabelled pictures are found in shoeboxes and envelopes; on the Internet, pictures are dumped onto CD-ROMs or untended GeoCities web sites. Write on the back of the pictures, or, if storing on a CD-ROM, have one of the students generate a table in Word with all of the information that can go into the folder with the CD-ROM. Keep all of the information together.

Label all of the pictures using: 

• What:

• Where:

• When:

• Why:

• Who [from left to right]:

• Who [took the picture]:

• Permissions: 

This is a good partnership exercise that students can do while laying out the site. Once the captions are in Word, it is easy to copy and paste them into the web site provided that you have permissions secured to post images, audio or text on the Internet.

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The "inverted pyramid" style of writing

Put your conclusion first. 

This is an example of the "inverted pyramid" style of writing. Students spend months or years working on the "funnel" style of paragraph writing: the writer moves from generalities to specifics as words and ideas trickle down the paragraph. 

For the Web, use the inverted pyramid or "inverse funnel" paragraph, where the conclusion occurs in the first sentence. Surfers will seize on the paragraph or discard the idea according to the first sentence. 

Not all of the "content" on a heritage/school project site is Web-ready and you do not have time to rewrite it: create an inverted pyramid paragraph or one sentence description that will link to the assignment and surfers can decide it they want to read on or not. 

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"Narrowcasting"

Narrowcasting occurs when writers describe events and people that are familiar to them without explaining context or identities to their audience. The writer writes for a specific audience-family, X-files fans, or teachers-and uses the specialized vocabulary of that audience without explaining to frosh or newbies what the word or act means. Explain identities, events and specialized vocabulary. Knowing your audience too well will affect writing style adversely: you will begin to write toward a small sliver of your potential audience.  

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Exploit hypertext 

If you want to direct people to sites that interest you, to places where you found good clip art or images, to cite a source in a bibliography, use hypertext links to direct surfers to these resources. You do not have to spell out the address for the surfer: provide a hypertext link for them so they do not have to cut and paste the URL into their browser's address bar.

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Always sign your name

Developing a site or project biography is one of the most important pages of content that you will create. Web experts and surfers frequently complain that they cannot find out general information about a web author, designer or project purpose. They do not want to send an e-mail asking for this information.

People want to know about the writers on the Internet: they want to read more of their articles, they want to follow links to the author's personal web site and they usually want to know who the author is reading to get access to ideas, especially if this information is just a click away. 

Visitors are interested in your life--your Web life, not your real one. They do not want to know the "real" you nor do they wish to contact you in person--why a "mailto" link masquerading as an autobiography is a bad idea. Show them who and why you are on the Internet.

^{1 "}Yyyyy" or "Xxxxx" are used on the Internet for people who do not wish to be named. back

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