When to start training staff content authors?

24 November 2011

Actually, Alice wrote this blog post, not Rachel. Alice talks to web development teams every week, so she understands the problems you face. Web managers often ask us when to start training staff content authors for a new web site. The simple answer is as soon as possible. You, as a web manager, may want [...]

Read the full article →

Long list of dot points: a neat solution

23 November 2011

What to do when you have a long list of items of equal weight—and a numbered list is not appropriate? Above all, don’t just vomit them out. Communications dogma says un-ordered lists should be restricted to 3–7 items. This makes perfect sense: there are only so many points we can hold in our short-term memory [...]

Read the full article →

Struggling with WCAG 2.0 Accessibility Guidelines for content authors

7 November 2011

A Contented course on WCAG 2.0 for content authors looked like a piece of cake at first—after all, the information is all readily available in 159,800 easy words. Why would that prove difficult? We believe there’s a need for a quick, practical course in WCAG 2.0 for government employees who—at least sometimes—write stuff that is [...]

Read the full article →

11 tips for getting the most out of conferences

23 October 2011

Tomorrow at 4 AM I’ll get in a taxi and set off for two conferences in Australia. I started writing down some realistic aims to remind myself what I hope to gain from this expensive exercise. In the end, it’s all up to me: as usual, what you give is what you get. I admit, [...]

Read the full article →

Training staff in business writing: not a hit-and-run project

18 October 2011

Training staff to write well is not a one-off project for new intranet: it should be business as usual. Business writing skills need to be regularly updated and refined, and spread around the entire staff. Sure, Strunk & White taught the unchanging essentials of clear writing in 1918, but they did not have to cope [...]

Read the full article →

Photos as web content and the emotional content of photos

14 October 2011

We’re running a contest for photos of places that convey a contented feeling. Alice and I choose spot-prize winners each month on the basis of their emotional impact. For the September round, we chose from a mere seven photos! (More have been added since then, happily.) Even so, it wasn’t easy, because all the photos [...]

Read the full article →

Writing tip: Beware the floating starter phrase

12 October 2011

Sometimes you’ll start a sentence with a descriptive phrase, for example: Sprinkled with chives, [...] Smiling broadly, [...] . What comes after the starter phrase and the comma? Make sure it’s the same thing that the phrase describes: Sprinkled with chives, cold potatoes are loved by kids. Otherwise you risk writing a very silly sentence. [...]

Read the full article →

The literary writer’s lament

8 October 2011

From poor poet to wealthy corporate web writer in 5 minutes? I don’t think so! We often get letters from literary writers that, in essence, say: I want to succeed as a poet (or novelist or children’s author or playwright). I have done a Masters in Creative Writing (or another literary degree). I need to [...]

Read the full article →

E-government web content problems—in Arabic

4 October 2011

E-government web content problems in Arab nations? Yes, there’s quite an overlap with what we see in English language government web content! In Ras Al Khaimah (RAK), one of the United Arab Emirates, Basem A. Shahin is fully involved in training government employees to produce usable web content. He is a consultant for IforU magazine [...]

Read the full article →

Making videos on video: we’re learning by doing

28 September 2011

Video. It’s so daunting. You make one, it’s not very good, so you conveniently forget about video for weeks, or months, or years. Then you make another video, which is also not particularly good. Alice and I have decided to take the bull by the horns and learn by doing. So we’re launching into a [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →