Reading Material: Anorexic Writing

Amber Simmons wrote a brilliant article on A List Apart on the importance of writing to web design.

Amber is absolutely right: writing hasn’t just taken a back seat to design; design left writing in the bathroom at the gas station.

So much emphasis has been put on user-generated content that we’ve forgotten that users aren’t going to generate our headers and footers, or our layout and alt tags. All of that "unimportant" stuff has been left to designers: form buttons, FAQs, instructions. Often even important "about" sections are left to designers. No one will read it, anyway.

This attitude is a vicious cycle. No one will read the content, so why bother writing anything worth reading? Why bother reading such bad content?

I will certainly be re-examining my footer content, with her thoughts in mind.

Just because something is on the web doesn’t mean it can’t be worth reading.