This book presents style guidelines based on quantitative research and practitioner lore about what works on the web, what flops, and what looks like leftover newsprint. It shows how to apply those guidelines to many common Internet genres such as customer assistance, product descriptions, distance learning, marketing emails, or webzines. The book also includes case studies of the prose from popular sites-two page spreads that will show a screenshot, and analysis of the prose to see how well it works. As more companies recognize that their survival depends on putting the whole company up on the web, everyone will have to write material that appears on the website-not just specialists in IT, or Marketing, or some out-sourced agency. This is the handbook for those people.

We are professional Web writers and editors. We regularly coach other writers, showing how to tailor their prose for e-mail, Web pages, and discussions. We focus on text, not design or tags. If you have to write text that will go up on the Web, we're talking to you. We have written for the Internet for the last seven years, so we talk from real experience¿and affection. We love the spirit of the Net.

We come out of a background in journalism (writing for magazines such as Esquire, Harper's, Reader's Digest, and TV Guide), technical communication (writing and consulting with an A-to-Z of high tech firms), art (conceptual art in New York), TV and radio (dozens of interviews, and our own shows).

Along the way, we've written 24 books for major publishers and hundreds of articles for Web sites. Our consulting clients include such firms as America Online, Apple, Broderbund, Cadence, Canon, Cisco, Coupons.com, Disney's Family.com, Epson, eToys, FileMaker, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard and HP.com, Hitachi, IBM, KBKids.com, Ketchum, Kodak, Los Alamos National Labs, Lotus, Matsushita, Middleberg Euro, Mitsubishi, Nikon, Ogilvy, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Relational, Ricoh, Sprint, Sun, Symantec, Visa, Xerox, and Zycad.

Jonathan has taught writing at New Mexico Tech, New York University, Rutgers, University of New Mexico, and the Extension programs of the University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Stanford. Lisa was the Features Editor at KBKids.com from startup days to $80 million merger; she writes a weekly Internet column, ShopTalk, for Coupons.com. She frequently appears on TV and radio.

We live in an adobe house in the woods along the Rio Grande as it flows through New Mexico. Our sons, Ben and Noah, take the Web for granted, but prefer football.