Advice on text composition and formatting
Your mind should be set on the reader.
When attempting to write texts, you should ask yourself what information your reader will need and how to present it in an understandable and interesting manner. Avoid unnecessary expert terminology that the reader might be unfamiliar with. Structure an individual text in the manner that the most important messages are placed either in the beginning, or accentuated by paragraphs, titles and secondary titles.
Use the first person of plural and personally address the visitor.
When writing about your organisation, use the first person of plural and address the visitor directly, in person. Avoid infinitives and other impersonal verb structures. This will make the page seem friendlier and more easily accessible to its user.
Your writing should be informative with no superfluous words.
Your website probably has a lot of competition, so it is important not to waste your visitors' time and offer them all relevant information before they get tired of reading and leave your page.
A text must be clear, simple and concise.
Abide by the principle that "more is less". Any individual text should have a single topic and purpose (e.g.: the topic is your product and the purpose is convincing the reader to try it.). In the text, you should attempt to answer five key questions; who, where, what, how and why. If any of these questions is not relevant, leave it out.
Divide the entire content into logical categories and subcategories.
This will allow your visitors to have a better idea about the purpose and contents of your page. Also, they will find the information they need more easily.
Use titles, subtitles and short paragraphs.
These titles, subtitles and paragraphs should follow the log of categories and subcategories. The text on the page should be broken off into short paragraphs of a maximum of five rows, with a blank row separating paragraphs. This will make the text more readable and pleasing to the visitor.
Highlight important thoughts and words.
People do not read websites from beginning to end: usually, at first, the text is briefly scanned, with only the titles, secondary titles and highlighted text (bold, underlined, italic, different font colour, font size, etc.) attracting attention. This is an effective means to lead the reader across the content of your text.
Use bulleting.
Bullets are a very good way to:
- improve the lisibility of the text,
- make sure the visitor will understand the contents with more ease and correctly,
- contribute to the reader's better memorising of the content.
Avoid special characters ($,{,#,§, ¤, ß).
Special characters may cause problems in the page display or in its transfer to web tools, such as RSS readers and social networking applications, so we advise you to avoid them if, whenever and wherever possible.
Use correct grammar and spelling.
The use of standard vocabulary ensures that the text will be universally understandable. Grammatical mistakes leave a poor impression with the reader, while correct spelling is also important if you want your page to be placed well in search engine searches.
Use links (hyperlinks).
When a visitor clicks on a hyperlink (e.g. the Klaro website) a completely new website opens up, or another part of the website currently visited pops up. This allows you to make the basic text a bit less packed and offer to the visitor some additional information on the topic in question: a good way of intuitively leading the visitor across your web content.