It is content which differentiates a good site from a bad one. The content should be backed by good writing. Then you have a masterpiece for the world to see!

Choosing the Content

Choosing the content of your site/page is not much of a difficult task. All that you require is that you should be passionate about something! The person who writes for this site with the pen(keyboard) name 'Tamancha' is very passionate about his subjects. When you read his articles, you can feel the depth with which he writes. One of my personal favorites from his collection is Life & Death. So the message is clear - choose a subject you are very passionate about.

Good Writing

'Writing for the web' basically starts with 'good writing'. Good writing is mainly characterized by:

• No typos
• Grammatically correct
• Use of short sentances
• Use of short paragraphs
• Appropriately punctuated
• Content precise & to the point

Writing with Style

Broadly we may segregate writing style to two types:

• The traditional fact relating style. Visit the The Hindu web site to get a idea of what this means.

• The modern style is the informal chatty way of writing. This is mainly used by individuals, not by organizations. Joe Burns of HTMLGoodies uses this technique in his newsletters.

Based on your requirements you can decide your style of writing.

A Note on Design

Never let the text flow the full length of the screen. It is difficult to read. For this purpose you may use tables with the 'width' attribute or Cascading Style Sheets(CSS). This document uses CSS. Choose a good font, if at all you have to. The default Times New Roman is good enough. The font you choose should be available with your visitor. Thus the best bet is to restrict yourself to the following:

• Times New Roman
• Verdana
• Arial
• Helvetica

Of course, if you have to use some special font, you can. Some font-embedding techniques are available for this purpose. Visit for more details:

• www.bitstream.com
• www.microsoft.com/typography
• www.truedoc.com

Choose a background color/graphic which doesn't hurt the eyeballs of your visitors. Choose a text color which comes out pleasingly out of the background without affecting the visibility of the text. Also, please do not underline your text. Only links are supposed to have underlines! Use bold or heading tags instead.

Tools of the Trade

Use of high-tech devices are a passion with me! So what are the tools which are needed to write a killer article? The basic requirement is a word processor. The Star Suite is available from Sun Microsystems for free download. Unfortunately we still do not have a online realtime word processor. But we do have dictionaries & thesauruses. You should understand that tools are just magic-wands which need a wizard to use. So for the magic to happen, let the wizard in you be out!

Resources on the Web

Search with the key-words 'writing for the web' in about.com:

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