Web Developers, Designers, Social Media Consultants… gather round!
Have you ever given a client a shiny new blog, quietly terrified that they don’t know what to do with it?
Have you ever winced at said clients’ shoddy blog posts, which defy every good practice of web writing?
Have you ever groaned with existential agony as your clients abuse the CMS you gave them by posting large swathes of incomprehensible copy?
Guides to Good Copy
I’m planning a series of short guides that explain in simple terms what makes good writing for the web. These will be freely available and you will be welcome to share them with your clients. Heck, you can even add your own branding to them, providing you leave a little space for my name.
What Would Your Ideal Guide Include?
I want these guides to be as useful as possible, so please tell me what things regularly trouble your clients. What aspects of writing for the web (including blogs and social networks) would you like me to address?
My intranet users tend to see wikis, conceptually, as word document and treat them as such. So you get single large monolithic pages with no links out and report style writing. Worst of all, it is common that they find the wiki interface not something they understand well so they use MS Word to write the document and then cut and paste into to wiki with no styles or headings etc. A guide that enables ordinary office users to “get it” would be very helful to me at leat.
Comment by Quentin — November 21, 2008 @ 4:29 pm
Hi Quentin,
Thanks for your comment. The issues you raise are exactly the kind of thing I want to explain.
I often see blog posts that are just big chunks of hard-to-read copy, and it pains me!
Hopefully the finished guides will be useful to your intranet users – if you like I’ll send you the draft and you can make sure it will be useful to your users.
Cheers,
Leif
Comment by Leif Kendall — November 21, 2008 @ 4:47 pm
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