sugarenia.com

By working with tons of text displayed on web every day, I’ve developed some particular pet peeves as far as structure and presentation of web content is concerned.

The rules are simple, bloggers / copywriters / web journalists:

1. Never ever use CAPITAL LETTERS to emphasize words.
   CAPITAL LETTERS are meant to be used in names and at the start of sentences. No matter if it’s a strong word you want to accentuate or your company name (the most common case), it must follow the rules of proper CAPITALIZATION.
2. Avoid center aligning text
   Center alignment may sound more logical to you, as it brings the text viewport just in front of reader’s eyes, but you must avoid it while writing long passages of web content. Struggling to find the start of every sentence is tiring for the eyes and disorientating, so avoid that.
3. Don’t use different colours in the same passage of text.
   If you do, use colour to symbolize hierarchy: main text should be darker, dates or other additional data should be lighter etc. Don’t use colour to emphasize, there are attributes exactly for this reason, namely bold and italics.
4. Do not use suspension points at the end of every sentence, hoping to look “cool”…
   These make you look neither cool nor mysterious… They are supposed to be used where you want to leave a sentiment linger - and nowhere else…
5. Do use white space.Absence of decent white space in e.g. a blog comment over 10 lines is a recipe for unreadability (if that word exists).Do not hesitate to hit that Enter button, it’ll make your text passages easier to scan and pay attention to.

These are all pretty basic, really, but you’d be amazed how badly content is written for the web. I can relatively withstand grammar and syntax errors (I make mistakes all the time too), but those above, I really cannot forgive.