Writing for Church Sites: Short, Scannable, and Simple - Short (An Article from ChurchWebResources.com, a Resource for Church Web Site Teams)

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Writing for Church Sites: Short, Scannable, and Simple

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When it comes to writing normal, sentence-based text (macrocontent, not microcontent like headlines or titles), you should have half the text that you would have in the print equivalent of your web site. Some usability experts even recommend trying to trim that remaining 50% in half again--this is a great goal to shoot for. Why should you keep content short? It's simply, really.

studies show that people read 25% slower on computer screens than on paper, due to decreased screen resolution, uncomfortable distances from the screen, and other factors
people hate to scroll

If you must have a large body of text on your site (as is the case with this site) try splitting it up into smaller, topical "chunks" which can be linked together. This helps to keep people's interest and reduce scrolling.

Since reading on computers is such a pain, many people prefer to print out longer texts instead of reading them on screen. In this case, you'd want to provide the capability of easily printing a well-formatted version of your text. On this site, we use a "Print this article" link for just such a purpose.

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Writing for Church Sites: Short, Scannable, and Simple

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