People read computer screens differently than they read printed books or magazine articles.

As Jakob Nielsen has shown, people scan websites. They don't read every word from the top down. Moreover, their eyes tend to bounce towards familiar places when looking for certain kinds of content.

People are used to seeing the site's logo in the upper-left corner of the page, and being able to click it to return to the homepage. So, if you're going to put your company logo somewhere, put it in the upper left.

Because people scan websites instead of reading them, use highlight the most important points. Put key phrases in bold. Use whitespace to set off important text.

Stickiness

When I'm reading a book, if I want to read another book, I have to go through quite a few steps: put the book down, walk over to my bookcase, find a book I'm interested in, pull it out, and open it. When I'm reading a webpage, if I want to read another webpage, I just hit the Back button or my Bookmarks/Favorites menu. I can jump to interesting content in a few seconds.

As such, your writing must be concise. As soon as the reader is bored, s/he is gone. So, don't bore anyone.

Guidelines

This is stolen from "Reading on the Web" by Jakob Nielsen:

• Use highlighted keywords for important concepts. Note that blue, underlined links are already highlighted.
• Write meaningful sub-headings that are tied to the text.
• Use bulleted lists for any lists, not a textual paragraph describing the list.
• As best you can, start with the conclusion. Give your reader the most important information early, then use the rest of the page to explain in more detail.

More resources:

• Jakob Nielsen's Writing for the Web contains a bunch of articles, from which I pulled a lot of material for this lesson.