1. K-State home
  2. »Communications
  3. »Communication Services
  4. »Publishing
  5. »Style Guide
  6. »Writing for the Web

Communications and Agricultural Education

Communications and Agricultural Education

Kansas State University
1612 Claflin Road
301 Umberger Hall
Manhattan, KS 66506-3402

785-532-5804
785-532-5633 fax

Writing for the Web

Suggestions by Amy Hartman, electronic documents librarian,
K-State Research and Extension

Content and Readability

Users skim webpages and may not take time to figure out how a site is supposed to work. To make a webpage lend itself to skimming:

  • If a title is long, put the most important words first.
  • Keep paragraphs short, and put the most important content first.
  • Use subheadings and lists. Not all readers will scroll down a long page.
  • Avoid blocks of small print, jargon, and complex sentences.
  • Sans-serif fonts, such as Arial, may be easier to read online than serif fonts, such as Times.
  • Black text on white background has the best contrast.
  • Links should be easy to find (colored text, often underlined).
  • Link to a file to print (PDF, for example) for easier in-depth reading.
  • Don’t confuse readers with text that looks like a link (colored or underlined) but isn’t.
  • Webpages are discovered by search engines, so each should make sense if read alone. Include identifying information (header, footer, etc.) so readers know where each page originated.
  • The title, subheadings, links, and text should include logical keywords.

Technical Issues

  • Avoid spaces in names of Web files and folders.
  • Avoid posting scanned documents. Use real text so search engines can locate content. To determine whether text is real or scanned, copy and paste it into a word processor (MS Word, for instance).
  • Test your pages. Proofread text and check links frequently.
  • Look at the pages with more than one Web browser.
  • Keep file size as small as possible.
  • Multipage documents (such as PDFs or PowerPoint) should be less than 1,000K.
  • Large documents are slow to download. Use low-resolution graphics files (less than 100K, smaller if there are several graphics on a page). Add alternate text to graphics so search engines can read them.
  • If you use several photos in a rotating slide show, make sure they are exactly the same width and height. Rotating photos of different heights makes the text below the photos seem to “bounce.”
  • Animated graphics can be distracting.
  • For PDF files, add a good title to the document properties. This title is displayed in search results.

Some concepts from: Don’t Make Me Think! (2nd ed.) by Steve Krug (2005, New Riders Publishing)