Writing standards on the web have come under fire from former journalist and internet publisher Lee Creek.

Corporate sites and their associated news magazines do not come up to scratch, he said, but there are simple steps they could take to improve them.

"There is a great deal written about development of sites, with much of the emphasis being placed on usability, navigation and appearance. It never ceases to amaze how people can spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on a site and end up with a creation fraught with spelling errors, typos, grammatical mistakes and paragraphs that run longer than War and Peace.

"One might expect to find such problems on personal web sites, but those same problems are just as common on corporate ones. Such mistakes reflect poorly on the company, detracting from the image the site might otherwise create."

Mr Creek recommends the use of spelling and grammar checkers. Writers should produce and check their copy in one of these first, before importing it to an HTML editor - which often fails to do such a thorough job.

"In addition to spelling and grammar checking, all copy should be read by at least two people," he added. "Spell checking only checks spelling, so words incorrectly used go undetected as long as they are properly spelled."

Paragraphs should be no longer than 50 words and writers should check that blocks of text do not run into each other. They should also be aware that many computer monitors do not display beyond 640 pixels, so writing for 800 pixels will mean the user has to constantly scroll to the right to read each full line.

Lee Creek set up his own internet publishing and design company in 1989.

Sources:

William Strunk's Elements of Style
www.makovision.com/m/tr.asp?l=1935
wdvl.internet.com/Internet/Readability

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