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.1.First we define the communication problem.What communication need does it fill?2.Then we define the target audience.Who are the intended visitors to the site? What are theirdemographic and psychographic characteristics?3.Now we want to define the communication objective.What is the purpose of the site? Sales,marketing, information, instruction, presentation, public relations, or personal?We always need to ask ourselves about the strategy for achieving the objective.Think about all thewebsites you have visited.Some of them, like Nike s and Red Bull s, are intensely visual with Flashanimation, stunning graphics, and color experiences that require a visual response.2 Some sites are2See www.nike.com and www.redbull.com.270 CHAPTER 12: Writing for Interactive Communicationsdominated by text and links.Other sites, such as Apple s, combine visuals and text.E-commerce siteshave pragmatic features such as catalogues, shopping carts, and secure payment links.Corporate web-sites serve multiple needs that can include public relations, financial information for investors andshareholders, production information, recruitment of personnel, customer services, billing and pay-ment capability, and finally sales.Most Internet portals, such as Netscape, Yahoo!, and MSN, are somewhat like electronic newspa-pers.They present news, and some columns are rewritten daily or hourly.They are different fromnewspapers in that the home page is not the equivalent of the front page.A newspaper puts leadingstories on the front page to complete them on inner pages.An Internet portal is also a table of con-tents as well as a provider of leading stories.Most of the site has to be apparent on the home page.Sometimes this leads to too much business, distraction, and confusion.The front page of a portallinks you to many other types of information and activities, such as stock market and finance news,popular culture forums, chat, email, commerce, and specialized interests.Sidebars list all the head-ings under which you can explore the site.There is no dominant theme in the home page experiencethat many corporate sites try to achieve.Their home pages make a statement of corporate identity,mission, and purpose; or the best do and the rest should.We can apply our classifications from an earlier chapter on corporate communications that divideobjectives into broad types: informational, motivational, and behavioral.Without being exhaustive,we could categorize website functions in the following ways: % Informational: Internet portals, government sites, library sites, colleges, corporations,newspapers, databases % Motivational: entertainment, marketing, advertising, selling, pornography, movie trailers,games % Behavioral: e-commerce, shopping carts, payments, instruction, surveys, video games, emailfeedbackMany sites combine one or more of these objectives.Linear writing, or prose exposition, which is the centuries-old model for print writing, requires asequential development of ideas moving from a beginning through a body of argument or narrationto some kind of conclusion.The whole experience of reading is contained in the pages of the articleor book.In contrast, web writing, which at its simplest could be a box containing the equivalent of aprint article, is not limited to linear delivery in a frame of text.The information or idea can be devel-oped with hyperlinks that highlight themes in the article that explore, sideways as it were, tangentsthat supply a lot of detail about something that would otherwise interrupt the flow of the main text.It is the same idea as the footnote in print media.Many writers, especially those presenting factualarguments, want to back up their points with sources or comments or asides, which are then put atthe foot of the page or at the end of the chapter.In a sense, the web expands the footnote by makingit interactive, by linking and branching to the actual source or another line of argument.Another way of thinking about the difference of web writing is to see it as multilayered writing.Bymeans of hyperlinks, panels, sidebars, fonts, and colors, you can reach more than one audience at aDifferent Writing for Websites 271time.In fact, one problem of web writing lies in the unpredictable demographics of the surfer in yourdomain.On some sites, there is something for everyone.It is like the sections of a newspaper.Yougo for the sports pages; I go for international news; someone else goes for the classifieds.Websitesare also the broadsides of the information age.In Shakespeare s time, a printer would put together anews sheet and run out on the street to sell it to curious passers-by until the innovation of the weeklyand daily newspaper in a later century.Websites look for passing trade among the surfers as well asformal communication generated by emails and published links.The bloggers, who might be privateindividuals with a passion or interest in some subject, providing some alternative views or sources ofinformation, resemble the seventeenth century broadsheet publishers.In Shakespeare s theater, every class of person from educated gentlemen to illiterate groundlings satin the audience.The plays contained comedy, tragedy, vulgarity, sublime poetry, suspense, grippingplots, history, and profound psychology.Portals and browsers are a kind of Internet theatre.Theyhave something for everyone.So what we encounter is an omnibus of writing drawn from multiplesources.Websites make generous use of text.Some, like the portals of the major browsers, are clut-tered with text leads and banners.So short, effective prose that headlines ideas and topics does thejob.To communicate effectively, you need to conceptualize interactivity and introduce effective, func-tional graphics so that the options and functions are clear.At the moment, the home pages of AOL,MSN, Yahoo!, and other major portals and Internet service providers have a format that is akin to anewspaper front page, except that the headlines and tag lines are hyperlinks.Therefore, the writersand editors of these websites need a strong background in journalism and in the editing of breakingstories and weaving together of a combination of news and entertainment.However, the home pagesalso use still pictures, video, color, and graphic design to present opportunities to users.3Multilayered WritingMost of us are so familiar with web pages that we do not stop to think how they get conceived,designed, or written.Most web pages contain text of some sort, whether titles, headings, or labels.We might call that design text, the same use of text that we find on posters, billboards, and print ads.It has a graphic function as well as verbal exposition.Then there is the text that works like text in abook, newspaper, or magazine.It is prose exposition [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]