Web Writers Won’t Tell You These Three Weird Tricks

Disney news page
Screen shot of a Disney.com page--clicking on "news" leads you to this, a web page full of PR content.

Read for Nov. 18, 2024: This blog post has a click-bait heading, one you should probably avoid because that structure is trite and cliché, although being able to do it as a joke may mean that you do understand the web a bit.

When I am writing about “web writing” and “new media,” the concept bears some explanation. After all, almost any media today is disseminated via the web, whether it’s by posing a version of it on your organization’s web site, or sending a file via email.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Englishman who wrote the original HTML and decided to make it available as free shareware, thus changing the world. Create a whole new information infrastructure that rewires the world (and be British) and King Charles might knight you (although he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II), too. Berners-Lee created HTML about 1994 or so, is shown here in 2014 in Wikimedia Commons image by Paul Clarke. Sir Tim is still a key internet figure, leading an important international web group.

A few internet terms to know:

  • The Internet—A vast worldwide network of interconnected computers, including some huge “server farms” run by internet service providers and main internet companies (Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc.)
  • The World Wide Web—The internet, but not the web, is the computer network. It contains both visible and invisible parts. It’s hooked into cell phone networks and facilitates email, for example. There is a “dark” web used by hackers and criminals to exchange information out of the public eye. The World Wide Web is simply a visible, overt, public interface of the internet—it is the part that is created by HTML computer language, JavaScript and others. Understand that “the internet” and the “web” are interconnected, but that they are not the same thing. The World Wide Web is a visual, multi-media communication system, often used for PR, provided by the internet, but the internet is older and larger than the web.
  • HTML—hypertext markup language—is a relatively simple computer language that has been updated several times. It is the backbone that makes the World Wide Web function. Written by Sir Tim Berners-Lee—an English computer scientist who did some of his work at the CERN lab in Switzerland in the 1980s, before he left CERN and issued HTML in the early 1990s—HTML is code that is read by many “browser” programs to create visible web pages. One complication of the web is that a web page is not a layout in the sense that a magazine or newspaper page is—it is a recipe to create a visual experience, and like a Betty Crocker mix from Target, results may vary. Besides understanding that your web site is not entirely under your control—you create the Betty Crocker mix but an Android or Apple phone, Safari on a Mac or Firefox on a computer are the cooks and ovens that yield slightly different results—the other key to HTML is its reliance on URLs and links. Today, many programs (including Word and InDesign) can create web pages that encode your work into an HTML format, and there are additional programs, languages and tools (JavaScript and CSS, for instance) that are part of web designs, but HTML is still the base on which the World Wide Web rests. Even rudimentary knowledge of HTML is helpful to a communicator--I sometimes fix some issues on my blogs by directly coding in HTML, for example.
  • URL—a “Uniform Resource Locater,” or web address. Here is the web address of one of my blogs:  https://crgardenjoe.wordpress.com/. That would lead you to my home page. Each post in that blog has it’s own unique URL, too, for example: https://crgardenjoe.wordpress.com/2023/08/21/you-are-sculpting-your-future-self/ is the URL to a specific blog post, one I wrote one fall about MMU. Note the structure—the main URL of the web site followed by slashes / that lead to other places or pages within the site. In this case, WordPress uses the date of publication (Aug. 21, 2023) and the headline with hyphens inserted between words to create the unique URL of this particular post. (Blogger does exactly the same thing although the structure of the URL is slight altered.) It helps you a lot if you can understand some basics of URLs. (In case you wonder, "https" is a reference to the hypertext convention the web page follows--most web addresses begin that way, but you can usually type a URL without that prefix in most browsers). You use the URL to embed links in other content--you can turn any image or any set of words into a clickable link by embedding the URL in it. Here is a link to a blog post about the new Cedar Rapids city flag. Below is an image that is also link to a post about new bike trails in Cedar Rapids:

New underpass that leads under First Avenue in Cedar Rapids. Image by Joe Sheller.
 

  • SEO—Search Engine Optimization. It’s an important phrase among web writers. Do you use categories and tags on your blog posts? Good for you if you do—consider taking a few minutes to add those to most of your posts. The “tags” help search engines find your content. Also the language of your headings is important—a Google search is going to pay some attention to the words in your heading as well as how a post is tagged. SEO means using strategies that optimize the ability of search engines to find your content. It can involve advertising--you can pay Google to enhance your profile--but as a writing/content strategy, it is is a key point to remember. Write on the web using the terms that are important to the public you are trying to reach.
  • CMS--Content Management System. It's whatever tool an organization uses to manage its own web site. You already are using a CMS--via your blog (one reason I require you to have a blog--you're being trained to understand a CMS, which is likely to be a key component of any future communication career). These vary a lot in in function and ease of use, and require some flexibility on your part to be comfortable learning new systems--but they tend to all do the same things (after all, a given CMS does NOT have its own HTML).
  • Social Media—Two broad categories here: It can be the part of the web that depends on voluntary contributions of users to create content. Or, it can be cell phone apps (such as Instagram or TikTok) that feature user-created content. Thus, social media refers to web sites and apps devoted to person-to-person (and organization-to-individual) content creation and communication. Facebook is a prominent social media site, but Instagram (run by Meta, Facebook's corporate parent), X-formerly Twitter, Snapchat and many other sites or apps are thus “social media.” So are blog sites like WordPress and Blogger. In PR you have to understand how to use social media—a key to some past Fall Faculty Series events at MMU, for example, was use of Facebook events and ads to promote those talks. Social media creates many opportunities for PR, but an equal number of challenges.
A disturbing reality of social media is that successful sites like Facebook use computer algorithms which base each user’s experience on that that user’s history. There is, therefore, not one “Facebook,” but rather an electronic neighborhood constructed deliberately for you (and by you, since your click choices are building your internet experience on many sites.)

Below is an old example of my Facebook home page. It will change every time I click on it, an experience I'm sure you share if you are on Facebook. Note the sidebar ads, which reflect most what region or demographic advertisers choose to target, chances are you don't see exactly the same ads (nor posts) that I do. This is Joe's Facebook, which differs from yours, as does everybody's.

Facebook

Another reality is that almost all of your PR writing is web writing, when you think about it—and some of the conventions and needs of web writing are thus a part of almost any PR writing.

Mostly, what we are talking about this week is writing the copy that is the backbone of a web user’s experience of your organization’s site—the words that are meant to be displayed as an embedded part of a corporate or nonprofit web site. That language is likely to appear on a home page or an "about" page. And it’s already writing that you’re doing. Your blogs are web sites of varying quality and design—and I’ve given you feedback on whether your site seems attractive and intended to display your writing talents.

And it’s not just your writing talents that are on display. Your blog is primarily meant to show the world that you’re a writer, but you’re also a writer who manages the reader experience—who chooses the template, who embeds images (or does not), who links to YouTube videos or who does not.

Anyway, the text does OK in describing in very general terms some conventions of web writing. A person starting a communication career today definitely needs web experience beyond being a consumer of web sites (although being familiar with what is current on the web as a consumer is important).

City of Cedar Rapids
City of Cedar Rapids home page.

When writing for a web site, here some rules to consider:

  • The web is very user-centered. You know that your words are competing with a garish global village where literally anything is just a click away. In writing copy for a home page, or "about" page, for instance, you need clarity both on who you can reasonably expect to be drawn to your organization, as well the impression you’re creating with strangers. Understanding your user and what they want is a key.
  • Writing on most web sites needs to be brief. The words are a key part of the experience, but it’s also a bit like ad writing—the web is an audio, visual and reading experience. Your copy will exist in a structure, and the visual nature and design of the site needs to work well with the word content of the site. Many home pages, for example, are very lean—just an image and a row of links. For some corporations, the “about” page has more words than the home page (and about pages are important on the web—what’s your about page on your blog?).
  • Long documents can appear on interior pages. Home page writing leads to other areas of the site. The home page is a cover and table of contents, the in-depth information is on the inside pages of your site. And while most writing should be brief, it’s also OK to give users who want in-depth information more lengthy discourse. Again, center the copy not around arbitrary limits, but on what the user who comes to this page wants.

Each page of you web site also needs to instantly be identified as part of your site. Each page needs to have clear links to other places on your site, especially your home page. Your text is correct that your home page is a key part of your web site—but the web works via hyperlinks that can refer to any page. So, a unique user new to your organization won’t always be coming into your “front door,” but may be clicking on a link provided by a google search or even a link copied for them by a friend. To some extent, each page of your site has to function as its own home page.

To write copy for a web page, you need to understand the organization, its mission and scope, and its key publics. You also need a handle the size and complexity of the site. I think your text is a bit off base in one comment—it says that in the past, having a web site required having a dedicated employee, whereas now there are so many tools available that it’s not always necessary to have such a person, although I also think more and more organizations have a web staff or web expert.

That’s a gross oversimplification. The proliferation of social media, the popularity of video and video blogs, the movement of much of the web experience from computers to smart phones—the web is not becoming a simpler place and is not becoming easier to manage. And over the years, web sites have tended to become larger, not simpler. True, in the 1990s you needed a programming nerd to have a web site, and maybe you don’t need that person anymore.

But the amount of time and effort you’ll spend thinking about your publics' web and other social media experience already consumes lots of PR time and effort. That is unlikely to change. So do your best to tune in and be aware, in a sense beyond being a consumer and user.

Finally, remember how connected the web is. Strategically promote your content.

When I write a blog post, I tweet (X?) about it. I also post a link on Facebook. That’s pretty minimal in terms of promoting my own web content—and in PR, your effort to promote your message will be more in-depth and involved.

And you already have a web site that is PR for you. It’s called your blog. As an aspiring communicator soon to enter the worldwide web world of work, give it some attention. And promote it--do work you want the world to see, and, in your own way, announce it to the world.

Treat your blog as a personal field experience in the online world of your future.



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