Last week Yahoo! released "The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World." For someone like me who writes about the Web all day, this book piqued my interest because it promises to improve your ability to write for and about the web, (not to mention that it provides an authoritative resource on how to spell words like email and website).

In blogs to come I will outline some basic tips covered in each section, and hopefully persuade you to buy the book: about $17 from amazon.ca (the eBook version for kindle costs about $12).

• Test your copy's readability. Go to http://www.standards-schmandards.com/exhibits/rix/ and enter some sample text to test the Grade Level and Reading Ease Score of your website. You can also do this in Microsoft Word (search for "readability" in Word help for how to do this).

Part 1: Writing for an Online Audience.

As stated in the book and by recent studies: people read slower on computers than they do printed text. With this in mind, try gearing your web content to say more with less:

• Put your most important information up-front where people will find it fast.

• Make your text "scanable" short paragraphs, bulleted lists, bold when necessary, keep your pages short. People are more likely to scan the top of the page than the bottom.

• Include no more than two ideas per paragraph.

• Test your copy's readability. Go to http://www.standards-schmandards.com/exhibits/rix/ and enter some sample text to test the Grade Level and Reading Ease Score of your website. You can also do this in Microsoft Word (search for "readability" in Word help for how to do this).

• Write for a worldwide audience. Don't shut out the world by writing text that will only be understood by native English speakers, make your site accessible!

Those are some basics for writing online, stay tuned for more Yahoo! Tips on writing for the Web!