Try to avoid the following pitfalls commonly found in hypertext writing:
"Dumping" print documents online
Due to the difficulties associated with reading screen displays, long passages of text that require a careful reading gain little value from going online (Horton, 1994). In these instances, it might make sense to leave the document in its printed format but merely allow readers to access it online and print it for off-line reading.
Evidence of print documents "dumped" online include:
"Page turning" occurs when a writer breaks up an article into sequential chunks and includes at the bottom of each page: "Click here for next page." According to Jakob Nielsen, this presents "a truly bad solution to the problem of scrolling. It completely ignores what makes hypertext so powerful" (Allstetter, 1998).
Not structuring hypertext documents
The common assumption that hypertext writers do not need to organize carefully is "utterly false" (Bernstein, 1995, p. 45). According to William Horton (1994), users may not like being controlled, but they "do expect the writer to blaze trails for them. . . . Users don't want to have to hack their way through hundreds of choices at every juncture" (p. 160).
Unfortunately, many Web sites do not have a structure at all. They are merely collections of pages that people lumped together (Allstetter, 1998).
Writing complex sentences filled with unnecessary jargon and
unclear references
Falling victim to the "as-shown-above" problem
Stylistic whiplash
Not updating the content
Not supporting links with sufficient context
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Last Updated: May 2, 2001
(c)2000 by Alysson Troffer. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce or redistribute any material from this document, in whole or in part, without written permission.