Scan-N-Land

What's old news to you might be new to your readers

It is important to make Web sites easy to use for readers.

"You don't know how readers use your site," Matthew Greenberg, former executive producer of AOL and now an account supervisor at Mindshare Interactive, told students in American University's Interactive Jouranalism class on Saturday.

"You can't control how people use your content," he said. "They're going to read what they want to. They're going to go where they want to."

Making it easy to use a Web site brings readers back, he said.

Tips that Greenberg gave the budding Web journalists included:

• Content can have a long shelf-life, except when it doesn't.


• What's old news to you might be new to your readers.


• Archival cotent can be topical.


• But some content starts out old and stays that way.

"Make your Web page one-stop shopping," Greenberg said.

It is also important to tell a story without words because readers don't read entire stories.

"To assume that they are going to read the whole thing is folly," he said. "Pull in content that will expalin the story, even if the reader doesn't 'read' beyond the headline."

Videos, photos or graphics are ways to tell a story without words, he said.

But words are important.

"People scan pages," Greenberg said. "And scanning and skimming are two different things."

Skimming is quickly reading through the whole story, although not every word, he said. Scanning is quickly looking over a page and reading what catches your eye.

To hook readers, words must be focused, concise and clean, Greenberg said. But it's about more than words, it's about formatting.

Other tips included:

• Don't use italics, because they are hard to read online


• Stay away from foreign words


• Use bold type sparingly


• Use explanation points sparingly


• Think about how the text is going to look once you publish it.

Finally, he said to use the whole page to tell the story.

"That's the beauty of this medium -- you have so many ways to tell your story," he said.

-- Mark H.

posted by Mark H. @ 12/16/2006 11:09:00 AM