Web-writing

The intentions on weblogs or online news sites should always be to keep it simple for the reader. It should be concise and quickly sum up the facts for the reader in the first sentence. With this in mind i decided to do a bit of investigative browsing and look at some of the popular mainstream sites to see if they fulfill this goal.

I looked at two english newpaper sites to see exactly how they went about keeping the reader through story structure,lay-out,web-writing etc.

The home page on the Guardian newspaper (www.guardian.co.uk) is very interactive and the headlines instantly make sense with the main story being about the grenade attack in China having 6 relevant related links. The opening paragraph on this story also immediately outlines in a short sentence however in my opinion this article is too long at over 800 words.

The Daily Mirrors site(www.mirror.co.uk)  couldn’t be any different than the Guardians with a lot of images used to show the reader instantly what the story is about. I was surprised to find no mention of the grenade attack in China on the homepage so decided to read a random story about an FBI sting that recovered the little girl from her father who had abducted her. This was a short piece that instantly outlined the story in a concise inverted pyramid. Again this couldn’t be any different than the Guardian however I feel that both have got it wrong in some aspects particularly length. The Mirror’s story was too short and the Guardians was too long.

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