Writing for web

One of my colleagues is working on a "How to write for the web" course. This will hopefully create some more established policies and practices for us, and for other web workers.

Web as a medium creates so many interesting possibilities, but in general this topic is way too little explored. Many fancy and costly web sites keep surprising me with a complete nonsense contents. There can of course lie several reasons behind this, but I guess the most likely one is a lack of competence - simply not knowing how one should write texts that won't be printed on paper but presented on the screen for a viewer who is always about to do something else.

A sister topic of this, and a topic I actually react daily to is how people write in emails. The level of formality varies quite a lot - even in emails between same sender and recipient. Why is it so? How formal should I be? I think about it quite often, and would gladly get some advice on it.

I will get back to this when the course has shaped up a bit more. In the mean while for those of us understanding Swedish the Language Council of Sweden's Guide for Web writers is a good start.