Newbie Web Author Checklist: Before You Publish That Project

If you've recently created your first website and you're getting ready to publish it, then this page is for you. I've helped hundreds of people create their first websites, and I really enjoy helping them move from their first tentative forays into electronic authorship to more advanced projects. Follow this checklist before you publish your web project, and you'll avoid many simple technical issues.

Jerz, Dennis G. Seton Hill University (2002). Articles>Web Design>Writing

Nourish Old Writing Skills, Add New Ones for the Web

The Web requires many of the same writing skills as print, but successful writers develop new ways of breaking up and linking.

Writing that Works (2003). Articles>Writing>Web Design

One Perspective: Blurring the Distinction Between Writer and Trainer  

In a recent round of discussion on an American Society for Training and Development chat list, corporate trainers discussed the diverse skills they needed to do their jobs well. Requests for assistance and advice evidenced the trainers’ concerns about their writing skill levels. In my own position as a corporate trainer I found myself training in classrooms three days a week and writing the other two. Handling new projects meant not only training the participants but also developing the materials that would be used. At the same time, existing materials needed updates or corrections to remain current with policies, procedures, and technology. The reliability of such information professionally affected the training department to a large degree. Consequently, writing and updating training-related documentation became the primary responsibility of the training department. Our role as trainers had expanded to include information management.

Van Dyne, Jenna. CPTSC Proceedings (2000). Articles>Writing>Instructional Design

Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings

Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2007). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Grammar

Penser "Multimédia"

Basé quasiment exclusivement sur le texte à ses débuts, Internet est devenu aujourd'hui un moyen d'expression multimédia, permettant d'intégrer tout autant des textes que des images, des vidéos, des sons , des animations, des programmes interactifs, etc. Ecrire pour Internet, c'est donc exploiter plusieurs supports d'expression.

Redaction (2004). Articles>Multimedia>Web Design>Writing

De Perfecte Tekst...Voor Het Web. Deel 1

Er heerst een enorme verwarring rond het fenomeen ‘tekst op internet’. Laten we het deze keer eens hebben over de ideale hoeveelheid woorden.

Pauwels, Marnix. de Lijst (2002). (Dutch) Articles>Web Design>Writing

Planning for One-to-One Web Marketing

The key to a successful advertising campaign is repetition. The same is true for a successful Web site. Marketing managers know that repeat contact with prospects develops an affinity for your products and services - and therefore, greater revenue.

Allen, Cliff. Allen.com (2003). Articles>Web Design>Marketing>Writing

Prepare Web Content and Organization For Your Audience

Communicators must know whether the audience consists of viewers, users or readers before selecting, writing and organizing content.

Writing that Works (2003). Articles>Web Design>Rhetoric>Writing

Producing Brochures in the Technical Writing Classroom  

Producing brochures for real clients teaches college-level technical writing students about constraints of cost, time, and the availability of materials. Brochure writing also provides opportunities for learning more about editing, collaborative work, document design, and the problems which may occur during the production of real documents. Brochures of good quality can be produced by a class in approximately three weeks, or nine classroom hours. Grading brochures is expedited through the use of a simple heuristic.

Ryan, Charlton. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Education>Document Design>Technical Writing

Promiscuous Fictions

With little exaggeration it might be claimed that the primary emotion associated with popular thinking about blogging is anxiety. The number of bloggers and blogs is unwieldy and amorphous: to my mind a sublimity that is often associated with the innumerable swamps journalistic and other commentators who believe that one must, perforce, make some generalization about blogs, all blogs, every blog. Is there something that could be said about every blog? Where would one start?

Curtain, Tyler. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Providing Context for Ambiguous Link Phrases

This article demonstrates a technique that allows ambiguous link phrases to be rendered visually in a page, whilst making sense to screen readers, and other non-graphical devices, that might render the links out of context.

Lemon, Gez. Paciello Group, The (2007). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Hypertext

Putting the "Technical" in "Technical Writer"  

Owens explains how technical writers can bolster their credentials as technically knowledgeable employees. He provides brief introductions to technologies that technical writers are most likely to encounter on the job: programming languages, databases, and Web server technologies.

Owens, David. Intercom (2003). Articles>Writing>Information Design>Technical Writing

Putting the White Back in Strunk and White

In web design screeds, the most commonly cited book is not what you might expect. It is not by Jakob Nielsen or Jeffrey Zeldman or Edward Tufte. It's not even on design or typography or code. It is a thin volume of guidelines on writing by a professor 'at the closing of the first world war' and treasured by one student enough to put it into print. William Strunk was the professor, and E.B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, was that grateful student. White took the master's set of laws, removed some 'bewhiskered entries,' corrected some errors, and added his own chapter at the end for 'those who feel English prose composition is not only a necessary skill but a sensible pursuit as well.'

Wodtke, Christina. Boxes and Arrows (2006). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Minimalism

Quality Criteria for Indexes, Website Navigation and Search    

When users find the answers they are looking for, the investment in technical documentation gets a chance to pay off. In large volumes of technical information, just finding the answer can be half the battle. Microsoft found that users of its intranet were spending an average of 2.5 hours per day online - 50% of that being searching. This article was written as part of an experimental online workshop with the MITWA (Mentors, Indexers, Technical Writers & Associates) discussion group(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MITWA/). The article retains the workshop format including learning assignments.

Brown, Fred. International Journal for Technical Communication (2006). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Technical Writing

Reach Out and Touch Someone

The hardest part of communication lies in the many options we have available, and how tricky it can be to pick the right option for each individual member of our audience. When we write something, whether in print or online, we try to produce something that satisfies as many readers as possible because we require a 'one size fits all' solution: we're not physically present to tailor our approach to meet each individual's needs, and so must meet a range of needs in a single document. With print, we're stuck with static text: the text can't change until we rewrite it and distribute a new version. Moving information online makes it easier to revise and distribute information, but actually updating the information still requires a writer. Are there alternatives that make it easier to reach customers with our messages?

Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Geoff-Hart.com (2001). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Personalization

Respect: Last Word of Advice for Online Copywriters

I'd urge you to treat your readers with respect. Respect for site users or e-mail and newsletter recipients is not a way of writing, it's a state of mind. It's the belief everyone should be treated decently, be told the truth. It's a genuine discomfort with even the idea of treating people as if they were suckers to be taken advantage of. Writing with respect is about being honest, with both your audience and yourself.

Usborne, Nick. ClickZ (2001). Articles>Web Design>Writing

Revising Letters to Veterans    

A discussion of the process of making letters for veterans easier to understand.

Daniel, Reva. Technical Communication Online (1995). Articles>Writing>User Centered Design>Usability

Say When and Where

Certain expressions in web content get users all discombobulated. Relative expressions of time and place need an anchor, a key, right there in the text. Some common confusers follow. They would not be a problem in other circumstances. But on the Web or intranet, every page must make sense in isolation.

McAlpine, Rachel. Quality Web Content (2005). Articles>Web Design>Writing

Search Engine Copywriting: Focus on One Topic

There are three approaches I take to the creation of a page, and each has a significant impact on how high the listing for that page appears on Google.

Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2005). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Search

Semantic, Structured Authoring

This article looks at the impact of the introduction of semantic markup and structured authoring on the world of technical writers, editors, Help authors and content developers. This article is not specifically about the Semantic Web movement itself, but about the implementation of semantic concepts in the documentation field.

Self, Tony. HyperWrite (2006). Articles>Information Design>Semantic>Technical Writing

Set Yourself Apart From The Ordinary

When visitors arrive at your site for the first time, the best outcome you can hope for is that they think, 'Excellent, I’m in exactly the right place. I can find what I’m looking for right here.' The problem is, the more you write the page to suit the needs of the reader, the less character it has.

Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing

The Seven Qualities of Highly Successful Web Writing

A description of the seven qualities of highly successful web writing. In future articles I'll write about each one separately, but here's the list in brief.

Henning, Kathy. ClickZ (2000). Articles>Web Design>Writing

Seven Tips on Writing a Web Site Landing Page Sequence

Much has been said and written about how to optimize individual landing pages. However, when you want a web site visitor to take an action, if often takes more than one page. So how much work do you put into optimizing not just the primary landing page, but also the pages that follow? Here are some tips to keep in mind as you write and optimize a landing page sequence.

Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2006). Articles>Web Design>Writing

Show a Little Character

There's a small problem online. An over-abundance of boring writing. Boring writing in emails. Boring writing on Web sites. Excruciatingly self-indulgent and boring writing in Web logs. Boring newsletters. You get the idea. But does it have to be this way? And do commercial emails and newsletters in particular have to be so boring?

Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2002). Articles>Web Design>Writing

Space | Action | Movement: Understanding Composition as Architecture

We have long understood the term writing as simultaneously an object and an event. We do writing, we are writing texts, we are reading a piece of writing, we are talking about a writer's writing, things that were written and are also, simultaneously, writing. But while the term 'writing' seems to do a wonderful job of capturing both object and action--what Louise Phelps once termed both the dancer and the dance--we still continue to treat those artifacts--the objects of writing, as relatively inert and external objects. In other words, we have succeeded in articulating the term 'writing' as either an action or an object, we have done less well in thinking about writing as a space in which action takes place. We have done less well in teaching our students (and ourselves) to think about writing as spaces for collaborative action. We have done less well at replacing the either/or with the and/and/and, as Deleuze and Guattari (among others) put it.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Clarkson University (1999). Articles>Writing>Design