Your Site, Your Way
Let's talk about your website.
What do you want to tell the public about your business or organization? What should you expect your website to do for you?
In planning your site, you should first target your audience. This will dictate the appropriate reading level so you address your readers in a way that is comfortable for them.
A good website should make friends and influence people. It should reflect the way you speak and write. Like a social meeting, your site should offer to shake hands. It should invite some kind of relationship, whether permanent or temporary, cerebral or emotional. However, a website is not the place for a disclosure of the intricacies of your life or the detailed underpinnings of your organization. Things change, but copies of websites are cached and saved, and remain available to the public, maybe forever.
"About Us"
Who you are and what you do will set the tone, not only for your text, but for the color scheme and the overall appearance of fonts and graphics. You may love black and purple, or paisley, but do those colors or patterns relate to your site?
You should also consider your relation to the public with accessability factors. If your readers are mostly older, you will want to keep the fonts big enough to read and the level of contrast between text and background should be easy on the eyes. If your public is younger, don't bore them. Oh, for that matter, let's not bore anybody!
What mood do you want to set? Sober or playful?
I design sites in a way that they can be globally changed with very little effort. If you want to change or even vary colors and patterns - by season of the year or hot fashion trends - alternate stylesheets can be provided.
If the physical location of your business is important, your color choices should reflect it.
Website Media
My mother calls a computer monitor a "television." Yes, the internet provides a lot of pure entertainment. But, unless your goal is broadcasting, your website should be more like a magazine: attractive, easy to read, clean-looking, with "white space." And interactive in some way - not a boob tube.
Unlike the ephemeral television program, a domain should be considered a permanent fixture.
In layout, there's not much reason to cram everything together or make long pages instead of several short ones. Nobody has to pay for "screen ink." With each page using the same layout graphics and stylesheet, charging for hosting "by the page" is ridiculous. An extra web page takes up only a few kilobytes of space.
That said, in a text-intense website, many clients prefer to see one article completed on one page. As long as there are not a lot of photos, a long page will load almost as quickly as a short one. The layout, section breaks and line-spacing can make a long article on one page easy to read.
Unless you are writing scientific material, you do not have to be married to the whole sentence. You need consistency from page to page, but there is no fault in writing sections in an advertising style rather than like a textbook.