TABLE OF CONTENTS The Web began as a way for researchers mainly physicists to share data, analyses, and conclusions with each other. The primary form of information on the early Web was text. In fact, the first Web browser could not display graphics only text.
Despite the emergence of browsers and browser plug-ins that display images and structured graphics and play audio and video recordings, the dominant form of information on the Web is still text. Text makes up not only the bulk of website content, but also the bulk of the user interface for accessing the Web: navigation links, button labels, error messages, help information, setting labels, setting values, and search terms.
The dominance of text on the Web makes it important to get the text in your website right. If the text in your website is wordy, hard to understand, inconsistent, or error ridden, chances are your site will be perceived by visitors as being of low quality.
Unfortunately, a lot of bad text can be found on the Web. Let's look at some of the most common textual bloopers and how to avoid them.
By far the most common mistake to make with text on the Web is to have too much of it. "Blocks of Text" is one of Nielsen's top ten Web-design mistakes for 2002 (see UseIt.com).
Needless text is bad anytime (Strunk and White, 1979) but is especially bad on the Web. People don't read websites, they scan them. They scan...
