Writing for the Web

Deciding What to Publish: Usability and Readability Knowing what content to publish — and how to present it — requires understanding how your readers actually interact with your site. Usability is the study of how easily users can navigate, read, and accomplish tasks on your site, and it's a vital part of any web writing strategy. Measure What Gets Read Your website analytics are a goldmine of information. They can tell you: Where visitors came from (a search engine, a link, or an email) How long they spent on each page Where they went after leaving a page Which links they clicked on Use this data to evaluate what content is working and what isn't. If visitors are leaving a page quickly, that's a signal to revisit the writing, layout, or structure. Testing Your Usability Beyond analytics, you can test usability directly. Useful things to measure include: **Load times** for images, videos, documents, and pages **Consistency across devices** — does the site work as well on a smartphone as on a desktop? **Form complexity** — if you're asking for too much information upfront, many users will abandon the form. Collect only what you truly need (e.g., first name and email address). **User satisfaction** — did visitors find what they were looking for? **Dead links** — broken links erode trust and