I’m currently writing new copy for the Boost website, which will be relaunching soonish with an updated look and a lot of new information. This has got me thinking about what’s changed about writing for the web in the 5 years that I’ve been doing this, and what’s stayed the same.

[NB: This post follows on nicely from last week's advice on launching with great content]

Let’s start with what’s stayed that same. You still can’t go wrong with the long/short rules:

• long page titles
• long headings
• long link text
• short paragraphs
• short sentences.

Other rules that have become good practice include:

• the disciplined use of numbered and bulleted lists to break up long pieces of text
• following the inverted pyramid style
• delivering one idea per paragraph
• strategic use of keywords in page titles, summaries and headings (without turning into a SEO-crazed keyword monster)
• using the F-shape to stack the most important phrases in headings and the beginnings of paragraphs
• writing tightly, avoiding padding and the passive voice.

Some things I think we’ve become a bit more relaxed about. We now trust people to scroll, and fret less about page length and getting content “above the fold” – a concept in itself becoming less and less relevant as the devices people use to view websites proliferate. (I have to include here my favourite text on scrolling.)

I’ve always had a bit of a bee-in-the-bonnet about link text. Thankfully, the days of ‘Click here’ seem to have passed, and people are writing link text that indicates where you’re going to be taken when you click. Generally, I prefer to be told/shown (and tell/show people) whether the link they’re about to click will keep them within the site they’re currently on, send them off to another site, or (pet peeve) trigger a PDF to start downloading.

Much as I love the Guardian‘s website, I’m often caught out by the behaviour of their links, which sometimes take you to another article, sometimes take you to an external site, and sometimes trigger a canned search. In the example below, ‘Internet Explorer’ triggers a search, ‘high-profile vulnerabilities’ is a link to another Guardian article, and ‘Responding’ and ‘an online petition’ go to two different external sites.

Links in a Guardian article: internal page, canned search, external sites

You can help people with the way you write your link text – see the WC3 guidelines on link text. Or perhaps you’ll read Nicholas Carr’s latest book The Shallows, where he argues that “the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources”, and be inspired to corral the hyperlinks that are normally sprinkled through your text at the end of the page, as Laura Miller did on Salon.

Then again. I often feel like a hypocrite when laying down the law for link text in a blog post. Blog posts, obviously, thrive on links, and often when putting a post together you use your link text in a slightly crafty way: linking to something incongruous to make a little joke, piling up a sentence full of evidence for your argument by pointing to different pages with each word. Blog posts are – along with other forms of conversational writing driven by social media tools – part of the changes to classical/corporate web writing that I’ll come to at the end of this article.

Another rule that’s stood the test of time: avoid jargon and use of acronyms (the TLA is a recurring cause of WTF on the Internet). Don’t use a fancy word if a simple one will do. That said, I’m a fan of the New York Times‘ look-up feature: if you double click on a word, a small question mark appears, and then when you click on the question mark, a definition from the American Heritage Dictionary appears in a pop-up box. Sure, it’s a bit of an insider’s trick, but it’s simple and unobtrusive. Plus, they report back on the words that stump people the most.

New York Times article with the look-up box open

I think the moral of this blog post is that good practice has generally stayed the same when you’re writing for a website, particularly a corporate or government site. But with the introduction of social media, things have changed.

Blogging, tweeting, Facebooking: these new channels demanded new ways of talking with readers, rather than telling them stuff.  And they introduced new challenges for people who write for the web. As Wellington web writing guru Rachel McAlpine observed in a recent blog post:

Yes, it’s true: some communication professionals are still unfamiliar with the working principles of content management systems, search engines, and accessibility. Some profess ignorance or horror when you mention Twitter, Facebook, or even blogging. They still haven’t noticed the C in ICT, or the technical in technical communicators. They barely know what the phrase social media refers to.

This is understandable if retirement is close. But tragically, some of these communication nuns are young, really young—in their twenties. Can you believe it?

First came blogging. For the first time, we were told that a personal voice – one that came from an actual identifiable individual – was important. More informal, sometimes opinionated, sometimes playful; the blogs you return to over and over again are the ones where you are intrigued either by the quality of the content or the quality of the writing.

Then came Facebook and Twitter. These demanded something else again. Timeliness became a new consideration: you have minutes to respond to a tweet. Brevity is obviously even more of a concern than it was with classical web writing, but then again, a number of newbies who I’ve shown Twitter to over the past few years have been surprised to see that “it’s not all in text-speak”. A real voice is even more essential than with blogging. When I started writing for the web, I would never have envisaged I’d be publishing things like this as part of my job:

Talking to people about digital collections on Twitter

As someone who enjoys writing, these new outlets were something of a blessing. Learning to write for the web had had made my style leaner, but it was verging on the anorexic. As Madeleine Schwartz noted in a recent post on the New Yorker books blog, writing about the Yahoo! Style Guide

What room does this leave for actual writing? Stylistic flourishes do not appear to be the book’s main concern. Instead, most advice is directed at generating more page views. All the guidelines have a hypothetical reader in mind—a reader who is constantly in a hurry, would never “jump hurdles” to find a piece of information, and must be roped in at all costs.

Writing for blogs and Twitter let me play again. Sure, the basics still apply. Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and unnecessary verbiage won’t do you any favours. But you can’t learn this kind of writing from style guides, just like you can’t grow a personality from self-help books. The people who write for you on the web – scratch that, the people who speak for you on the web – are now found in your web team, your call centre, your development teams.

What interests me is when the two types of writing get mashed together. When you stream your tweets to your homepage, does one kind of writing make the other seem incongruous? Is your corporate site as fun to read as your Facebook page? Should it be? What do you think?

]]> http://www.boost.co.nz/blog/usabilty/web-writing-changes/feed/ 1 http://www.boost.co.nz/blog/publishing/content-7-steps/ http://www.boost.co.nz/blog/publishing/content-7-steps/#comments Mon, 09 Aug 2010 23:29:03 +0000 courtney http://www.boost.co.nz/blog/?p=1045

Content. It’s the red-headed stepchild of any website project. The thing that 9 times out of 10 blows the time-line out of the water. The task that only ever seems to get bigger, not smaller. Why is this?

Perhaps it’s because content development is often spread over a number of people, none of whom have it as their highest priority. Or perhaps the job is dropped on just one person, who does it on top of their regular duties. Perhaps it’s because content writing often sits outside the design and development process, or perhaps it’s because design and development both have clear and familiar processes, and these aren’t as well established for content writing, editing and loading.

Whatever the reason, there are some things you can do to get your content into line. Based on our experience, here are 7 steps and a couple of bonus pointers, designed to help you with your content project.

1. Get a content wrangler

Employ, assign or beg someone to take on the lead content role. They will:

• carry out the content audit, and use this to manage the development of content
• own the style guide, and make any style decisions
• create content templates, and train writers to use them
• decide when pieces of content are ‘finished’
• handle translations (if required)
• manage any sign-off procedure.

It may be that this person writes and edits all the content as well. It may just be that this person is you. In which case – congratulations! Having one person in charge of all the content is the ideal situation (even if it means you’ll be frantically typing for the entire duration of the project).

If you can’t achieve that, having a single content wrangler who is recognised as being in charge of all content-related decisions, and who has the authority to set deadlines for the provision of content, is the next best way of ensuring content is completed on time.

‘Content strategist’ is another word for content wrangler. A List Apart published a great series of articles on content strategy; some of my favourites:

The Discipline of Content Strategy by Kristina Halvorson

The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome by Pepi Ronalds

The Case for Content Strategy by Margot Bloomstein

2. Get a style guide

The point of a style guide is to improve the consistency of your content. They can be a godsend when you’re dealing with a group of writers.

There are a plethora of books out there that you can buy, and I’ve found that people are often happy to share their style guides. If you work in a larger organisation, there may already be a style guide for print publications which you can adapt for the web.

If you’re having to start from scratch, some points to cover:

• the tone you’re trying to achieve, and the audience you’re writing for
• formats for dates and times, phone numbers, addresses
• conventions for how you refer to your organisation
• conventions for the use of acronyms, abbreviations, and industry or sector specific jargon
• conventions for link text
• examples of good page titles, subheadings, image and table captions
• decisions on moot words (e-mail or E-mail or email? web site or website? home page or homepage?).

If your writers are unfamiliar with writing for the web, I’d suggest running up a workshop to introduce them to the main concepts and differences from writing for print. This has the bonus of bringing everyone together and ensuring a shared understanding of the content development process.

Something to bear in mind: style guides need regular updating to stay relevant. How about setting up an annual date with yours, just to make sure it’s in good shape?

3. Carry out a content audit

The content audit is probably the most tedious and most important part of your website project. After all, the whole point of this project is (or at least, it should be) to communicate with some people, and your content is how you do that. It comes wrapped in design and sits on top of technology, but at the end of the day, it’s the words that really matter.

A content audit for a website update has three stages. The first stage is a page by page analysis of all the existing content on your site. I usually find it easiest to do this in a spreadsheet. Each page gets a row, with columns for page title, URL, description, status (keep/edit/delete) and notes.

Content audit: the inventory stage

If you’re super-keen on details, you can

• include each news item and event
• note all external links and whether they’re still working
• keep a separate worksheet for all downloadable documents on the site (where they’re linked from, what format they’re in, what date they were written).

The next stage is to add in the new content you want to develop for the site.  This is also a good stage to start assigning pages to writers, if you’re working with a team of people.

Content audit with new pages to be written and writers assigned

The final stage is where you turn the content audit into a tracking tool. Use it to record where the content is in the development process (started, drafted, copy-edited, sent for sign-off, signed off) whether the page is being translated and where it is in that process, and anything that’s blocking progress.

Using the content audit as a tracking tool

To be honest, this is usually the point where my spreadsheet sprouts a rainbow of colours, with a complicated key. You’re welcome to be more restrained, but sometimes, when you’re in the depths of the content mire, turning all the completed pages sunshine yellow can be a small but valuable psychological pick-me-up.

4. Get to grips with social media

While you’re auditing the content on your site, why not run a quick check over your social media presences? Have a look at:

• where you have accounts (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, delicious, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo – you’ll be amazed how these things proliferate)
• when you last posted or updated
• whether you’ve become an active/valued part of the community
• whether these presences are doing what you hoped they would
• how you might want to incorporate these presences into your website.

If you haven’t set yourself up on any social media sites of services yet, this is a good time to think how this might complement your website.

5. Prioritise your content

Technically, this should happen between stages 2 and 3 in the content audit.

Once you’ve identified all the pages you need to update or create, prioritise them ruthlessly. What do you really need to launch with? What’s nice to have? What’s the most important new content you need to add? This is the way I usually approach prioritisation:

1. existing content that requires updating to move over to the new site is first priority
2. high-value new content is the second priority
3. existing content that will benefit from cleaning up is third priority
4. nice-to-have new content comes last.

6. Set up some templates

Templates that show writers how pages should be structured are very helpful. At the simplest level, they might lay out the essential elements for the page (title, summary, body copy, examples of how links should be written). Instructions on how to indicate heading and subheading levels are often useful, if people aren’t using set styles.

For an example of a highly structured content template, see Erin Kissane’s article on A List Apart.

7. Get ready to be interrupted

While you’re working away diligently, filling pout templates with your well-prioritised content, new items will creep in. Often this happens as part of the wireframing process,  but sometimes it doesn’t occur until the technical build is underway. This is when you need to start providing pieces of content that are often small but urgent, things like the ‘remind me of my password’ screen, the ‘your form has been submitted’ screen, the ‘there are no results for your search terms’ page.

This is often off-the-cuff writing, and consistency will be improved if only one person provides this content.

Bonus: Common hiccups and stumbling blocks

Translation often causes a bump at the end of the writing process. If you’re working with an external company or translator, talk to them about the size of your project, and ask them how long they think it will take them to turn a given number of words around. Check whether they have recommendations on how you should provide your content, and incorporate this into your templates if necessary. Decide whether you will provide content in one batch or stagger it. Finally, hold off translating navigation elements for as long as possible, as these often change during the design and usability testing process.

Load your content at the end of the development process. Trying to load content into a site that’s still under development can often cause irritation and delays as developers and content loaders inadvertently get under each other’s feet. If you can, wait until the site is has been tested and the bugs worked out. You might feel like you’re losing time, but a concentrated push a week before launch is the most efficient way of getting all the content into a site.

Two tiny points that will save you grief when it comes to content loading. If writers are working in Word, discourage them from making hyperlinks in the document: instead, tell them to place the link text, followed by the desired URL, inside square brackets. And tell people to never, ever embed images in a document: set up a folder where images can be saved, and use a naming convention.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for sticking around all the way to the end of this post. Next week, we’ll be posting about the actual writing of the content, asking whether anything has changed in the past few years.

I spoke about technology in education at the Future of the Book Conference at the end of June. The conference was great fun. I was there for the second day – for perspectives on the whole conference, check out these posts by Virginia and Matthew.

I talked about how technology is changing the way young people organise themselves and take action, access information and learn, connect with each other, create and publish to audiences, and consume services and products. I talked about how we might design learning experiences for these young people.

How digital technology is changing the way young people learn, create and consume.

New technologies, new practices, new learning – the result should be new approaches to educational publishing. Did we get that at the conference? I’m not sure we did.

The future of reading and learning

If we focus on book formats and technologies to the exclusion of exploring changes in the social and cultural practices associated with using technology, it’s inevitable that the future of the book is pretty much going to be a book. If we want to open the debate and explore the possibilities beyond the book, then we need to consider the future of reading and the future of learning to get to the future of publishing.

We also need to call a halt to the unhelpful dichotomy that pits publisher-produced, ‘credible’, ‘superior’ content against user-created, ‘unreliable’, ‘inferior’ content. If we’re truly going to follow market trends, as conference speakers proposed, then we have to pay attention to interacting and collaborating with our audiences as well as producing quality content.

Opportunities for publishers

So what are the opportunities for educational publishers?

• To become experts in designing learning experiences and environments that maximise the affordances of technology and support educators to understand the limitations and the benefits of technology.
• To engage directly with our communities of learners on a longer term basis – curating their experience of our products and responding to their interpretations and the learning experiences that they bring to the table.

From an education perspective, we need to engage young people’s cultural and social practices and provide opportunities for transformative learning (a shift from filling students’ heads with facts to including opportunities for students to do something with their knowledge). We can support teachers to be effective in the classroom through our learning designs.

I think publishers can commission, write, design and curate across the range of media and in multimodal forms (thanks to Meg Pickard, Communities and Interaction Manager at The Guardian, for this notion of ‘curating’). Publishers should use whatever media is most appropriate to bring together content and community to tell their story.

I think publishers can plan for and predict likely interaction with audiences and contribute an editorial or curatorial role that influences and creates community – without scripting that interaction to the point where participants can’t relate their own experiences to it.

Some examples

Some examples heading in worthwhile directions:

• DigitalNZ’s memory maker lets users remix content (how cool would it be if users could also upload their own content for remixing?).
• On the Learnz virtual fieldtrips – from volcanoes to marine reserves – students stay at school but visit places they would never otherwise go and interact with people they would never otherwise meet – supported by background materials and activities, audioconferencing, images and videos uploaded daily.
• And a suggestion for converting a print publication to online (I’ve blogged about this before). What learning could we make available if the fabulous Journal of Young People’s Writing were a blog? Instead of publishing completed student work in a fixed format, we could publish student work with great potential – with a great opening, a great ending or great dialogue. Invite writer David Hill to critique and explore. Invite other students to comment and illustrate. Invite graphic artist Ali Teo to respond to the illustrators. Draw comparisons and contrasts with work by other writers. Turn the existing model inside out by exposing the workings that are past and hidden by the time classrooms receive the print version.

The slides from my presentation are here.