Genre Fluency Entry 4: How-To Websites

Overview

Ever wanted to do something, but didn't know how to do it? You can find books in your local library that tell you how to do some projects. You can watch TV and find a show on the Discovery Channel that shows you how to do some projects. The how-to genre has been around for a long time. However, the World Wide Web has helped it explode.

The World Wide Web is the perfect medium for this genre. It provides the following characteristics for nurturing this genre:

• Easy to publish information
• Simple to present pictures
• Easy to search for information

It is easy to publish information on the Word Wide Web. Anyone with an Internet connection can sign up for free webspace to talk about anything—including telling others how to do something. This helps, because it allows people with the know-how on a topic to get up on their soapbox and tell the world.

It's very simple to present pictures on the World Wide Web. While you're writing up the text for a webpage, you can simply drop in an <img> tag and have your picture show up right next to your information. This helps to graphically demonstrate how to physically accomplish something—a necessary prerequisite for showing people how to do it.

It's easy to search for information. With the advent of search tools like Google and Yahoo!, once someone publishes a how-to article, another person can easily find it.

Examples

Here, I will examine three how-to websites. In the first, I use Google to find out How to make a pumpkin pie. In the next, I use the popular site Howstuffworks to find out how to cut your own CD. Finally, I use The Linux Documentation Project to examine how to burn a CD from a seat of MP3 files.

Using Google

Google is probably the easiest way to find a how-to entry. By simply typing in "how to make a pumpkin pie" into the text field and clicking "Google Search," I was able to find dozens of entries on how I should make a pumpkin pie.

The first entry, on the Joyofbaking.com website, is a good example. One person's name, Stephanie Jaworski, is featured prominently on the top of the website. It seems as though she just decided to post her experience on cooking various dishes on the World Wide Web for others to peruse.

The website begins with background information about pumpkin pie. This includes information about its origins, why certain ingredients are used, and different variants. It gives optional steps—such as making your own pumpkin puree for the pie if you wouldn't rather buy canned pumpkin. This introduction serves to give context to the how-to post, and establishes a more personal contact with the user.

The website then goes through a series of steps on how to actually make the pie. This particular website does not number the steps; instead, its instructions are written in sentence form and assembled into paragraphs. Again, this is more personal than a bland numbered list of steps.

The ingredients list and the text of the article have hyperlinks to other pages on the same website. These give more information about a particular ingredient or procedure. This keeps users on the website longer—otherwise, they might wander away from the site never to return.

Large, General How-to Websites

There are a handful of large, general how-to websites around. These include howstuffworks and eHow. These websites include how-to information on many different topics. These websites are good ways to find how-to articles when Google fails, or if you're experienced with the site and like its format.

Howstuffworks is a popular website that has how-to information, as well as descriptions of how different devices and processes work. This website splits up its how-to articles into several different pages. This is helpful because its entry is much longer than the pumpkin pie entry.

Each page has a listing of related steps and concerns. The steps, like in the pumpkin pie entry, are not numbered. However, there are sometimes lists of options that are formatted as numbered lists. Some of these things are actually ordered lists, but others are unordered lists that should instead be bulleted.

The how-to entry provides background information, like the pumpkin pie example. Again, this helps to provide context. It also keeps users coming back to the site, which is more important for a site like howstuffworks—it is a large site offering lots of content, and would like users to come back and look at its other entries.

One clever trick that howstuffworks uses is to show ads related directly to the task at hand. When it shows you that you have to buy a CD burner to write your songs to CDs in the how-to, it advertises CD burners for purchase. Not only does this help the user find the tools he needs to complete his task, it also provides ad revenue for the website.

Clever ways of finding ad revenue are one of the major concerns for the larger how-to websites. They are too large and too expensive to run without some sort of funding, and ad revenue is typically the way to provide this.

Large, Specific How-to Collection Websites

There are also how-to websites built around a specific topic. They provide information all related to some specific topic. One example of such a website is The Linux Documentation Project. This website provides hundreds of how-to entries all related to a single topic: The Linux Operating System.

TLDP provides how-to entries for a variety of topics, ranging from writing compilers for programming languages to Burning Music CDs from MP3 files, all in Linux. This website is significantly more technical than the other two because it caters to a specific group of people.

Like howstuffworks, the entry is broken up into different pages. However, it is split into numbered sections on each page. As before, it begins with an introduction. However, this introduction more serves the purpose of letting users know the background information and issues that might occur during the procedure. It also tells why the author decided to write this how-to entry.

Although the introduction is written in paragraph form, some of the other sections use a numbered list format instead, especially when order is important. To illustrate how a user should interact with the computer, a monospace font on a grey background is used whenever the user should type something into the computer.

The how-to entries for TLDP are all written on a volunteer basis, and organized and collected by other volunteers. The writing style, therefore, differs significantly between entries. However, TLDP provides software that keeps the style of the how-to pages to look very similar between authors. This provides for an interesting collection of pages that look very similar, but are read very differently.

Conclusion

If you ever want to write how-to documentation, try to keep to the following guidelines:

• Write about something you've done before and enjoy doing: you'll have plenty of advice and knowledge on the subject that you can convey to others. You'll know the pitfalls and how to avoid them.
• Use multiple pages for all but the simplest of tasks.
• Number your steps. This will allow users to keep track of where they are.
• Provide a troubleshooting section, or add troubleshooting information throughout your how-to, to guide users back to the path when they have gone astray.

How-to sites all are very useful at helping to show how to accomplish a task. There are different ways to find entries based on what you're looking for, but chances are, the topic you want exists somewhere. There are different writing styles, website designs, and driving purposes behind the websites that host these how-tos, but they all help accomplish goals. These websites show that the World Wide Web is the perfect distribution medium for the genre.