by
Francis Till
Text-centric commercial websites
are taking a pounding this year, with layoffs and closures affecting even the
giants as advertising revenue streams slow. One result of this revenue squeeze
shows in such widely read information sites as Forbes.com,
Salon.com
and the Financial
Times, all of which are experimenting with new
web formats to better compete for readers.
The average webmaster is not, of
course, involved in the production of a major news site, but any webmaster whose
site depends on text-based content can learn much from a close examination of
the design changes taking place on these content behemoths, all of whom have
already solved the threshold content issue (quality) and are now wrestling with
usability issues to draw and keep reader bases.
Across the board, the changes
these sites are making are closely related to positions long held by web usability
guru Dr.
Jakob Nielsen, who has been arguing for almost a
decade that the rules of effective online presentation are completely unique to
the medium. Dr. Nielsen has devoted his work to showing us just how that
uniqueness plays out in practice and his work has been augmented now by an
online news reading study from Stanford University and the Poynter Institute,
the Stanford-Poynter
Project.
The Message is the Message
As designers, we tend to forget,
especially when in the grip of a new presentation tool, that, as Nielsen said of
web content in 1997: "the medium is not the message; the message is the
message... " (alertbox).
In application, this means that for readers, the medium should be transparent,
and the single biggest obstacle to achieving that goal online is a website that
intrudes upon text, or just doesn't present text the way users take it up.
Increasingly, text heavy site pages at
premium news sites are constructed in ways that might have come from a Nielsen
playbook, and while some (like Digital NYT) still try to replicate the look of a
print vehicle, most are moving away from long-cherished print layout and
presentation standards toward styles that recognise the character of the Web
interface.
The Scale of the Problem
The Internet started out as a
text-centric medium, full of plain vanilla ASCII documents that just rolled out
on the (often green) screen, but a quick look at the Yale Web Style Guide <info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/contents.html>
is enough to convince anyone that text presentation has long been a content
issue of independent importance.
Current statistics suggest that
about 32 million websites are sharing 400 million surfers globally, and while there are a well-documented 1.3 billion web pages
(documents) within reach of search engines, there are at least 500 billion that
are not.
This means that the old ASCII web stream
has turned into a polyglot river of Amazonian dimensions upon which website
design is evolving as a multi-nodal industry often afloat like a hapless,
jury-rigged raft, contending with competing legacies from the ASCII veterans as
well as print designers who have switched media, and both groups often at
complete odds with designers who have been nurtured on interactive broadband.
So, what makes one architecture more effective than another?
Where you stand is what you see ...
Obviously, there is no single canon
that can encompass the entire enterprise, but the Stanford-Poynter and Nielsen
work on how readers - and eyes -- interface with computer screens provides some
important principles about how websites can most effectively present text
content.
If you're a fan of Dr. Nielsen's, and
many web designers are, much of this may be old news. For years, Jakob Nielsen
has been telling us that text on the Web is absolutely not text on paper, and
that it has its own rules of organisation, layout and style - rules that often
directly contradict those that reign in print.
According to Nielsen, 79 percent of
readers online will simply scan a page, picking up bits and pieces as they go,
rather than "read". In part this is because it is difficult to read
text on low-resolution screens, but it is also something that may be inherent in
the hyperspace nature of the medium.
How can you make your points, then?
Nielsen says you can, but only if your text content:
· is broken up by headings
· is shaped into lots of punchy, single idea
paragraphs
· puts key phrases in bold face
· bullets key points
· avoids jargon and rhetoric
· is straightforward, and
· is short.
In May 2000, almost everything Dr.
Nielsen has been telling us was verified by the Poynter Institute study of
eye-tracking movements among online readers, but with a few controversial
additions.
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