Writing for the web.  Is it any different than writing for offline purposes?  I mean, it seems so simple, we’ve all been been writing since we were kids, and I thought I finally started to get good when I started writing frequently in college.  But, how to write for a web audience?  What changes to make and for what reason?  That’s a bit tougher as we all know that people read much less when they’re online.  Let’s take a look at some best practices for writing for an online audience.

Do people read less online than in a magazine or book?

Yes, it’s true.  This has been studied and reported for at least the last 15 years.  People read less when they are staring at a monitor or other electronic display compared to a printed piece of paper.  Stationary monitors causes more eye strain than printed paper, they are a projected image (instead of reflected images on a page) and are at a lower resolution than a printed document.

Plus there are the ergonomic issues of posture, sitting more upright, things like this – but high brightness backlit monitors, starting with CRTs and leading today to the best LCD screens, still prove harder to read than a printed piece of paper. 

So the rule of thumb since the beginning of the internet age is that people read one-half as much online, and skim the rest of the content.  So a good design practice is to write one-quarter to one-third as much as if you were producing a printed piece, and format your writing properly for scanning, instread of in-depth reading.  I know that sounds like a big cutback in copy and maybe a bunch of extra work in formatting, but believe me it will show results.

What best practices can be put in place to help the reader online?

Try following these simple rules for writing online, you’ll find that you need to work at it to be brief, but it will pay off.

1. Use the Inverted Pyramid Structure for writing
2. Create Short Articles with links to other Short Articles
3. Use Short Paragraphs inside of the Short Articles
4. Spend Time Formatting Text – Including Headings

Use the Inverted Pyramid StructureTry putting the conclusion first.  Sure, you were taught in school to build up with an introduction up front and the present your information and wrap up in a conclusion, but people online really want to get your conclusion first and then will read more if they want to.  Again, this is due to people scanning articles and not really reading everything.Please fight the urge to ramble on about your favorite subject in one long post.  You’ll get many more people to read a 500 word article or blog posting than a 2,000 word epistle.  If you have a lot to say about something, split it into two pieces or even a series.  People surfing the web have less time to devote to something and they will not want to commit to something that’s seen as too long.

Create Short Articles with links to other Short Articles

Use Short Paragraphs inside of your Short ArticlesDon’t write large blocks with no breaks and expect people to follow along.  Very long paragraphs are difficult for readers to scan through.  Try to keep your paragraphs down to a maximum of three or four sentences and keep your language clear. 

Also, when you have to use special language make certain that it’s clearly defined with “quotes” or other style.

Format Text When Appropriate with Good Style!Some of the basics for highlighting in an article; you can even see them used in this article that I’m writing!

• Use BOLD, italics and Heading markups, especially when you need to either draw attention or set up a new section.
• Have a list?  Make it a bulleted list – like this one.
• Find some great images to help make your point and use them sparingly as graphic relief.

I dipped my toe into the waters of online community building back in 2004 when I decided to launch my own web community / forum for the Chevy Trailblazer.  That process lead me to launch several other Chevy related sites and it eventually turned into GM TRUCK CLUB, which is one of the largest Chevy Truck and SUV forums online today.  I’ve recently relaunched Toyota Truck Club and will be putting into place everything that I’ve learned so far into this new community launch.

This year GM Truck Club will get over 2 million visitors (maybe more) and perhaps as many as 20 million pageviews – almost all are Chevy Truck, SUV, Crossover and Van related topics.  How did I get to this point today?  Well, honestly, it’s just like anything else.  Get a plan, find the right tools, learn about and use the most current technology, start building good content and stick with it.

Don’t forget that it will take a while to get running too, so don’t get discouraged if it takes a year or more to really “take off” where the community might run itself.  There is a lot of competition out there, so you have to work hard to build an audience.

Best practices for building a good online community

Passion - You’ve got to start with an idea that you’re passionate about.  It won’t do you any good to start a blog or a forum for a topic that you know nothing about or have no strong interest in.  I’m sure there are plenty of Chess forums out there, and while I enjoy playing from time to time – that’s not my thing so it would be very difficult for me to start one and keep it running.  However, I have been a web marketer and SEO expert for several years now, so keeping this blog going, while a challenge, is something that is fun and rewarding for me.  I like the automotive world and have since I was a kid, so that was a natural and fun area for me to develop a community.

Hint – I actually enjoy a LOT running GM Truck Club and I look forward to posting and interacting with all of the members – this is a big key to the success of the site over the years.

Technical Components – Yes, you do need to know some stuff, at least the basics.  Get a good web host and ask them to help you out as much as possible, most will.  Try to avoid the bare-bones hosts that only cost $5.99 per month because you often will get very little support and they sometimes cut back on features, even blocking some types of scripts from running on the system.

Back in the day, I learned how to hard-code HTML and other web languages just to get by.  Today that’s not as necessary as more then enough CMS (content management systems) exist and are pretty solid overall, but you should learn as much as you can and don’t be afraid to ask questions when you just don’t know someone.  WordPress, vBulletin, phpBB3, Joomla and other packages are all free or cheap and provide you with just about everything that you need on a techincal level.  You do need to know how to safeguard your data.

Protect your database! I’ll say it again, PROTECT-YOUR-DATABASE!  It’s the heart, soul and brain of your community, so don’t let anyone have access to it that you don’t trust 100% – and make certain that it’s backed up and taken off your server DAILY.  Don’t skimp on this and pay your web host or a third-party like mozy to do it even if it’s an extra cost.  You need to protect your files too, but they can be re-downloaded and replaced – but a database failure will destroy your community and you might never get back to where you were.  Also, if one of your competitors gets a copy of your data, there are import tools that can quickly and easily upload your content to their site, including your user base.

Content – You’ve got to keep good and fresh content flowing on a regular basis.  Don’t think that you’re going to have a hot blog if you just post once per month.  DAILY posting are good, but at least post on a schedule perhaps at least 2 or 3 times per week.  Yes, I have seen good blogs that are updated each week at or near the same time, but those are exceptions and often they are much longer editorials or commentaries.  If you’re running a forum, make certain that you follow up with questions within just a few hours of them being posted.  Get your friends involved at first just to help out and don’t be afraid to pay a professional writer to help out with helping you format your first few (or few dozen) articles or posts – professional writers are good, fast and generally inexpensive.

Community Members - Don’t be afraid to give extras to your best users and always keep your eyes out for good moderators from your user base.  I like to run contests every year to give back to the members.  I find some of the best vendors out there and I give away free advertising in exchange for freebies that they ship directly to contest winners.  Don’t neglect your community members!

Members like to know the rules of a site too.  Some allow for an anything-goes mindset, while others are more conservative and have profanity filters and remove objectionable material from the site.  It’s your community and you can find an audience regardless of these types of policies, just make certain to make them known so there are no surprises to site visitors.

Making Money! – Ok, this is the part of the post that people might fixate on.  There really is no magical solution for this.  You need to get an audience first, then you can start to make money.

- Google Adsense is the quickest and easiest way to start earning money – either by a CPM (cost per 1,000 displays of an ad) or CPC (cost-per-click) basis.  Don’t expect to quit your day job running Google Ads, but you could expect to have all of your hosting and software costs covered plus a little profit to fund further development.

- Contextual Ads are another good choice, such as Vibrant Media or Kontera.  They are the little ads that show up in the middle of your content.  My experience with these is that they help to supplement the Google Ads, but they often only make about 20% as much money.  Keep that in mind, they are also pretty easy to install.

- Direct Ads come from vendors that want to run ads directly on your site.  This can be done any number of ways, from simple to very complex.  I currently run my own Ad Server, called OpenX, and do take vendor ads when they come to me.  You will have to own the relationship and its now up to you to collect the money, come to terms on an agreement, change the way that your site operates, run an ad server if you need to show banner or other ads and keep things current.  However, the amount of profit on the ads is 100% instead of splitting with one of the media partners, so it can make much more money for you, if you have the time to manage this as a program.

Summary - Start slow, post good content on a consistent basis, gather a crowd and treat them right, post good and clear site rules and build your community.  It’s not going to happen overnight for most people, but just keep working at it and someday you will have a strong online community you can be proud of.

I don’t think that I’m going out on a limb when I say that “Mobile” is the next big thing.  In fact, I can see the bandwagon coming down the road right now, it’s about time to grab my bag and hop on.

I’ve been a minimalist when it comes to mobile connectivity for the longest time.  I just got my first smart phone, and my previous cell phones have been just that … for voice communication only.  Maybe I liked my freedom, maybe I was focused on other things, I don’t know.  I sort-of knew that this day would come, and for me it was when a fully functioning device could be purchased for the mid $200 range.

Samsung Caliber on MetroPCS
I got a Samsung Caliber on the MetroPCS system a few weeks ago and I’m fairly pleased.  It allows me to make phone calls and get email; I keep and synch all of my contacts and have notes and events on here; it’s got a 3.2 megapixel camera and does pretty good video too.  Also, the GPS system is pretty robust with traffic monitoring, which has already helped me out quite a bit and I’ve actually found better routes to get to work on at least a dozen occasions, which is worth the price of admission for me.

However, it also allows me to surf the web on a full HTML 3.2″ touch screen.  Two problems with this.  1) MetroPCS is very slow – my neighbor used for work for them and said that it will get better by the end of the summer, but they’re running behind.  2) Surfing on pages that are not optimized for small screens is a major headache.  The system tries to display the entire width of a standard website (which have consistently gotten bigger and bigger over the years as home monitors have gotten bigger with better resolution).  Unless the page is optimized for a mobile device this it’s utterly unreadable and the user is forced to zoon and pan.  Not a good user experience.

A little history of web design for different screen sizes
When I started designing website full-time, back in about 2001 or so, no one had a flat panel monitor.  It was all CRTs and everyone wanted a something bigger.  The majority resolution was just coming out of 800×600 and I remember going to work for a firm in 2003 and they orderd me a 24″ CRT that came in looking like a massive waste of desk space.  I could hear the desk groan as I plopped it down.  Each and every year, LCD screens have gotten more common until around 2008 or 2009 you could not even find one for sale anymore.

Becuase of the nature of LCD screens, we’ve jumped up from 72 dots-per-inch (dpi) to about 96 dpi a few years ago and most monitors today should be able to display 120 dpi (a printed piece of paper for comparison is about 300 dpi and a good color photo is about 600 dpi).  So back then, we designed for 800×600 resolution with graphics at 72 dpi. 

Today, I plan on 1000 pixel wide for my standard design.  We used to get around all of the different screen sizes by allowing for fluid width (100% of your screen, whatever the resolution), but now the super large widescreen monitors have made this practice also unpredictable.  (I’m on a 1920×1040 display now on a 25″ TV that doubles as a monitor… fluid for me would cause me to turn my neck).

Somewhere in the middle of today and 2001 web design had a serious problem.  How do you design sites for older monitors and also for the new stuff as well?  It was a challenge that led to a lot of narrow fixed-width design (some good, some not so good) and a lot of compromise.

Mobile for GM Truck Club website
So where does this all lead?  I’ve launched a beta Mobile site for GMTruckClub.com and it solves a lof ot the problems that I face on the Caliber.  However, MANY of the regular community members cried out that the mobile platform didn’t work for their device!  Argh, we’re back to 2005 again when we’ve got to design for different sizes screens.  We’ve got large widescreen displays, laptop access, large mobile screens and smaller mobile screens to deal with all at the same time.

Well, I have a feeling that things will start to standardize over the next couple of years.  I’ll keep working on this and will try to get more feedback from visitors and members.  It’s not rocket science, but just something that designers and web marketers need to be aware of.  Things keep changing – be ready for anything.

I’ve been creating websites and doing web marketing for about 10 years.  The first website I created was WAAAAY back in 1996-1997 when I was playing around with the little bit of space that AOL members got (remeber AOL?) on the aol.com/members/~blahblahblah structure.  Things have certainly come a long way since then, and if I’ve learned anything is that nothing stays the same, everything is moving forward all the time.

A survey of philosophy provided me with the axiom – You can never step in the same river twice.  You might say, “Well, here my foot goes into the Colorado river, then the next step is still the Colorado river!”  It’s still called the Colorado, but is it the same thing?  Before you take a second step, the water that was all around you is now 50 feet downstream, the silt and rocks underneath the surface have changed, all of the fish and organisms in the water have changed as well – so it’s the same river, but it’s also a different river at the same time.

That’s a good picture of what is going on with with web.  I learned how to code HTML in notepad, and it has served me well – but virtually every website I launch now is some type of CMS system.  It’s either a forum with vBulletin, a typical website with Joomla, or a blog with WordPress.  Each year I’m just amazed at how much easier, how much more complex, and how much cheaper these tools become. 

This helps explain my decision to become a full-time web strategist and SEO expert.  I’m not a coder, there are thousands of them.  I’m not just a “web designer” either, there are tens-of-thousands of them.  So, just like everyone else before me, I’ve had to specalize in order to find my place in the web world.  I’ve taken my career to the next level.

Where will the next year, the next decade, the next generation take up?  My guess is wireless connectivity is “the next big thing” and we’re already seeing advances towards that end.  I set up an early mobile Chevy Truck Forum site on GMTruckClub.com where it picks up your mobile browser and formats automatically – still have a lot of work to go on that, but there are some great examples of mobile sites out there to look at.  This will be pretty big and it will be good to get on the bandwagon if you don’t want to get lost.