It is important to remember that a user's first impression of a Web site can be affected not only by the design and the way information is organized but also by the quality of the written content. Highly institutional text, bad spelling and verbose sentences that run for four lines are all major turnoffs. Imagine reading the news section of the BBC online Web site and not being able to understand the point of the story or seeing major syntactical errors - you would question the credibility of the organization.

Writing for the Web is very different from writing an FAO technical paper, a country report or an internal brief for senior management. Web writing is usually punchier and more concise compared with its hardcopy cousins. For this reason, it is important to invest time and effort into making your Web copy readable.

This section contains some simple rules and advice that should allow you to improve the written content on your pages easily. However, it should be remembered that good writing is a skill (and a profession) so if budgets allow, outsource to a communications specialist.