Writing Word Documents for the Web

The language of HTML favors some features of Word and conflicts badly with others. Avoid having your document mangled by following these guidelines:

Do's	Don’ts
Table feature is a natural for HTML, use it to group or align together different content	Tabs and initial indents are disastrous, don't use them for paragraphs and especially don't use them for constructing tables
Heading styles are an excellent way to structure your document into sections and make that text stand out	Fonts do not export with your document, so do not rely on contrasting fonts to be distinguishable from each other once on the web
Bold and italics are well-supported in HTML and are a fine way to highlight some text in the body; centering is possible but often using a heading style would be a better choice	Underlining on a web page implies it’s a link, don't mislead people by using it for other reasons; if you do want a specify a hyperlink use Word's Insert Hyperlink feature instead
Flexible flow is the rule in HTML so consider margins out of your control and keep content to the left in single column format; expect blank lines to be tossed out	Wide content is bad because visitors hate to scroll sideways, so keep tables and figures narrow enough to display with only 500 pixels of width available, 740 at the most
Graphics can be inserted directly into the document, best along the left margin below the paragraph where they're first mentioned	Embedding a "document object" is risky, and especially bad for tables as it makes the table one very large picture
Equations are exported nicely as pictures if done using Word's standard equation editor	Symbols may not render correctly under HTML but are inserted automatically for quotes, etc; avoid surprises and turn these off through "Tools, Autocorrect, AutoFormat as you type"
Document summary under File, Properties is a good way to make sure the title is recognized properly and to specify keywords for searching	Bury special content in the body of the text and to search engines it'll get lost in a sea of words
References should be cited as (authors year) and listed in a section at the end, left justified, in alphabetical order as Authors. Date. Title. Source.	Footnotes don't work in HTML, although endnotes are possible if necessary

 

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