Gerry McGovern is no stranger to the cheeze puff. He mainly deals in corporate web-sites and ‘killer apps’ but beneath the website hype he’s making all the right noises:
What is print-thinking? Print lends itself to length and to economies of scale. It’s not that much more expensive to print a 120-page report than a 100-page one. It’s often not much cheaper to print one copy than to print 1,000. These economies of print influence how we write in subtle and various ways.Is the concept of the annual report a print-specific idea? Why do we need an annual report when we can get an instant update by visiting the website of the organization? Often, the content of an annual report is assembled months before it is published. It can be out-of-date and irrelevant long before the ink dries.
When an organization prints customer-related content, that content is nearly always to be consumed outside the organization. Thus, it is written in a very particular way, with lots of context, and with many sentences beginning with the name of the organization. It is designed to go out.
The content on an organization’s website is designed to stay in. The website itself is the context, and the very fact that the customer has visited the website implies that they have a certain awareness of the organization. This crucial difference can change the whole dynamic of how you write web content.
Print content is often leisurely and flowery. Web content is lean and pared to the bone. Often, the best web content is not a sentence at all, but rather a descriptive link.
Linking is the essence of web content, and a good web writer thinks in webs of links, rather than in series of pages. This is perhaps the greatest challenge for someone trained in print—to break that linear mode of thinking and think linking.
[HT: Alastair Rolfe]