Written Style vs Web Style

After reading Spiderpro's 100 do's and don't and Lynch and Hortons web style guides, it became apparent that know style guidelines for writing can be useful in creating a website.

Spiderpro's guide starts out by saying do know your audience. In any writing whether online or not it is important to know who you are writing for. You don't want to put information in a text or on a website that is not useful to the intended readers.

Another style that fits both texts andwebsites is to not over write. I wrote about this style rule for my Style Rules essay. I believe that less is more when it comes to words. People like me do not want to see wordy books anymore than they want to see a wordy website. A website needs to be much shorter than a text would, though. The reason for this is because sometimes people want information quickly when they are searching the web. People also don't like having to scroll to read their information. Lynch and Horton say, "Dense text documents without contrast and visual relief are also harder to read".

There are many guidlines that apply to webpages that do not apply to traditional written texts. For instance a web designer needs to take into consideration the capacity of his or her readers computers. Since not everyone has the same computer, operating system, or monitor sometimes webpages won't look the same to everyone. One person may have a computer capable of picking up millions of colors while the next three people have computers that only recognize 256 colors. When writing an essay or a book this is not necessary since each page will be printed out exactly the same for every reader.

Websites also need to be visually appealing. According to spiderpro dark colors do not work well on websites. The writer of an essay, newspaper, or book doesn't need to be concerned with visual appeal because they are all black and white.