Style guides and overviews
The guidance we offer in Web Style Guide has always been grounded on the functional aspects of design. In this second edition we extend our focus on functionality with additional sections on Web site accessibility, Cascading Style Sheets, and flexible page design. We include additional sections on information architecture, site maintenance, and multimedia design. And we have added illustrations and updated our Web site examples to reflect current best practices.
Research-based Web Design & Usability Guidelines
This site provides over 50 of the top Web design and usability guidelines based on research studies and supporting information from the field. Each guideline provides:
- A brief statement of the overarching principle that is the foundation of the guideline
- Comments that further explain the research/supporting information
- Source(s) of the research/supporting information
- A score indicating the "Strength of the Evidence" that supports the guideline
- One or more graphic examples of the guideline in practice.
Writers Resources Style Guides
A comprehensive set of links to various writing guides available on the internet (some broken links).
Writing web content
Mindy McAdams: Tips for Writing for the Web
A compact list of guidelines for writing and formatting text and links.
Nicole Hennig: Writing for the Web: Guidelines for MIT Libraries
A concise guide with good examples and references
Jakob Nielsen & Jonathan Fox: Writing for the Web
You can double the usability of your web site by following these guidelines: for two sample sites studied in Sun's Science Office, we improved measured usability by 159% and 124% by rewriting the content according to the guidelines.
Jakob Nielsen: Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines
Microcontent needs to be pearls of clarity: you get 40-60 characters to explain your macrocontent. Unless the title or subject make it absolutely clear what the page or email is about, users will never open it.
Jakob Nielsen: Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace
Journalists have long adhered to the inverted pyramid approach: start the article by telling the reader the conclusion ("After long debate, the Assembly voted to increase state taxes by 10 percent"), follow by the most important supporting information, and end by giving the background. This style is known as the inverted pyramid for the simple reason that it turns the traditional pyramid style around. Inverted-pyramid writing is useful for newspapers because readers can stop at any time and will still get the most important parts of the article. On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important.
John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen: Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web
Studies of how users read on the Web found that they do not actually read: instead, they scan the text. A study of five different writing styles found that a sample Web site scored 58% higher in measured usability when it was written concisely, 47% higher when the text was scannable, and 27% higher when it was written in an objective style instead of the promotional style used in the control condition and many current Web pages. Combining these three changes into a single site that was concise, scannable, and objective at the same time resulted in 124% higher measured usability.
Constance J. Petersen: Writing for a Web Audience
Studies show Web visitors don't read; they skip and scan. Will your Web site accommodate them? Also, solid, well-written, grammatically correct Web content is crucial to gaining the user's trust. Following are 10 tips to help you write for the Web in a way that gains the trust of your readers and supports their style of Web browsing.
Kathy Henning: Writing for Readers Who Scan
Write for scanners. That way, 79 percent of your readers will be more likely to get your message. And the rest will appreciate the time you save them.
Kathy Henning: Writing Consistently Across Media: Ten Proofreading Tips
Staying in character means being consistent across media. If you spell "email" without a hyphen on your Web site, don't spell it with a hyphen in print catalogs. If you omit final serial commas in online help, don't include them in emails.
OWL: Strategies for Improving Sentence Clarity
Nine great tips from Purdue University.
Nick Usborne: Just Say No to Dead Fragments
A dead fragment of text is what's left after a usability expert has had his or her way with some perfectly good copy.
Site structure and design
Constance J. Petersen: Seven Steps To Easier Web Navigation
Even with great content, a hard-to-navigate website won't get used. Here's how to fix that.
Constance J. Petersen: Web Commandments: Ten Deadly Sins and How to Overcome Them
Mistakes, mistakes, mistakes. The best way to avoid making mistakes in Web user-interface design is to know what those mistakes are before designing that new Web site.
Terry Sullivan: What is "Reader-Friendly"?
The sustained growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in the creation of literally millions of Web sites -- only a small percentage of which are reader-friendly. Fortunately, many of the principles from usability engineering can be easily applied (or adapted) to Web development.
Indi Young: Is Your Homepage Immature?
Mature marketing mediums — like television, magazines, and direct marketing — have had executives’ attention for fifty years or more. The Web is obviously catching up in this respect, but it’s still decades away from being well understood by marketers. It’s natural then that many large corporate homepages reflect the immaturity of online marketing.
Jeffrey Veen: Why Content Management Fails
Content management is not a technology problem. If you’re having trouble managing the content on your Web site, it’s because you have an editorial process problem. Your public-facing Web site is a publication. Treat it like one.
Writing labs and resources
Charles Darling: Guide to Grammar and Writing
An interactive site with lots of grammar and writing exercises and quizzes.
Purdue's Online Writing Lab (OWL)
A comprehensive site with resources, guides, online tutorials and some interactive exercises on writing techniques and grammar.
