A website should be appealing, it should catch your eye and make you want to scroll down the page. As Hosey said, “It should come as no surprise that good design, often in very subtle ways, can have such dramatic effects.” The such dramatic effects keep people reading and make people want to revisit the page. A person would much rather read a page that had eye catching design and images than a page that is bland or boring, no matter the content. In regards to content, it is important to tell a story or write in a way that people can connect to it. Carroll writes about this concept of “targeted serendipity” and describes it as a “shared point of view and information and sources a reader perhaps didn’t know he or she even wanted to see.” I find this concept very important in good digital writing, if you don’t relate your content to your reader or present things in a way that makes people contemplate topics people won’t keep reading. If as a writer you don’t challenge your audience and draw their attention there is nothing drawing them to come back. Carroll continues to say that blogging is a type of expression where a writer can make their views public. But a writer can’t make any view or opinion public if no one is reading. A writer needs to capture people immediately in the first post, they can’t wait until the third or fourth post because they wouldn’t have any readers. Now a days on the internet if you don’t grab people’s attention immediately, whether in a title or the first paragraph they won’t continue reading. As Morris writes in Digital Writing Uprises, “Good first sentences prompt us to perk up our ears. We read a good first sentence, the lights go down, the music starts, and we look around for our popcorn and candy.” A first sentence peak people’s interest and draws them in. A good website not only catches people’s attention through the title or first sentence but catches someone’s attention visually and keeps their interest throughout the entire article or post.
Carroll, Brian. BLOGITO, ERGO SUM. N.p.: Routledge, 2010. Print.
Hosey, Lance. “Why We Love Beautiful Things.” The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 15 Feb. 2013. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.
Morris, Sean M. “Digital Writing Uprising: Third-Order Thinking In The Digital Humanities.” Digital Pedagogy Lab. CC-BY-NC, 08 Oct. 2012. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.