The Good and Bad of Web Publishing
By Kylee Bristow, Lexi Communications
In this age of do-it-yourself everything, it’s easy to build a website, make it pretty and publish content. I’ve done it myself.
As a writer, it’s exciting to have total freedom to publish to the world, which just wasn’t possible when I was starting out.
However, as a wise person once said (either Voltaire or Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben, I’m not sure which), ‘With great power comes great responsibility’.
Yes, websites allow us to publish our content to the world, but the world still gets to decide whether to read it. The rules haven’t changed there.
So, without editors to save us from ourselves, we need to understand how to best use this publishing medium to attract readers, entice them to stay and make sure they tell their friends.
And it’s not as easy as it looks. Web writing takes print writing and puts some diabolical twists on it.
The Bad News
Web readers are multi-taskers
There’s something about picking up a book that makes you relax and settle in—you’re prepared to get invested.
But web readers don’t read like that—they jump around, scroll aimlessly, scan pages, skip lines and perform several tasks at once. You don’t have their full attention.
Web readers are impatient
You can’t tease web readers with an intriguing paragraph or two to suck them into a page—they don’t have the patience.
They’re very task focused and want to know quickly if they’re on the right track. If they’re unsure, they’ll just click away and find the answer somewhere else.
Your content keeps changing
When you publish a book, the format isn’t going to change on you unless you’re in Harry Potter’s world.
But in web publishing, your content can behave differently on different devices and even different browsers.
These are only some of the many ways that web publishing changes the game for print writers.
The Good News
But it’s not all bad. If you become really good at providing high quality, easy-to-consume web content that reads well on any device, your readers will make yours one of their go-to sites.
They’ll be relieved to find something that’s easy to read because, in this DIY world, so much content out there isn’t that great.
When you learn to write tight, cohesive content with a structure that’s logical and easy to scan, your readers will stop jumping around and stay put long enough to get invested.
When you learn to write for search engines, more people will find your content.
Web readers aren’t going to change their reading behaviour any time soon—we’re all trying to do too much with too little time and devices are probably here for good.
Therefore, to succeed as writers in an online world, we’ll need to learn the rules. Then we can take full advantage of the amazing publishing freedom that this era has given us.
Want to know more?
I’m running a 6-hour web writing workshop on Sunday 9 February at the Queensland Writers Centre (face-to-face and live streamed). Join us to find out how to create truly effective online writing.