[Sigia-l] Writing for the Web

[Paul Ford]

Richard Law <rlaw at cisco.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I'm starting to develop a series of guidelines for writing online
> content. I'm curious to know what best practices others recommend for
> writing for the web, as well as, repurposing (editing) offline content
> (e.g., marketing colateral, white papers, etc.) for use online.

The scope of your question makes it very hard to come up with a simple
answer. It's much as if you'd asked for the "best practices others
recommend for designing for the web."

There are dozens of decisions that professional editors and authors
consider before undertaking any content task, regarding style, tone,
audience, length, marketing goals (if appropriate), and linking
strategy. The overall site structure makes a difference, as well: is a
site structured in a hierarchy, or loosely joined by links? How much
do we need to educate our readers?  Is the site publishing a large
amount of time-sensitive content, or is it a permanent repository? The
editorial strategy you develop should answer these questions.

I once wrote for a site that was intended for small business
owners. All the writing was done in a journalistic style, and when new
ideas were presented in an article they were always summarized. This
sort of writing is dramatically different than working on a policy
manual that is posted to an intranet, or creatng a set of technical
documentation, where the journalistic new-idea-summarizing can be
eliminated, and replaced by a link of the "see the 'System
Configuration' page" sort. A product catalog requires a totally
different kind of writing still, as does a tutorial. The challenge
facing people in content strategy is in finding ways to keep all the
different kinds of copy that appear on the web, from nav bars, to
marketing, to technical docs, consistent. It's an almost impossible
task unless everyone involved in creating content for a given web site
is willing to agree to the standards involved, and an editorial review
strategy is firmly in place. Creating an site-wide lexicon is one
thing, but enforcing it is another.

The dynamics of your CMS can also determine style: weblogs often have
a quite different rhetorical approach in contrast to wikis, for
instance, and some of that difference can be explained by the
difference in the tools used to create, edit, and categorize
content. Sometimes it is best to work out from what your CMS allows,
and its approach to structuring a site, and develop your approach
accordingly. Deployment is also an issue. Writing in a structured XML
format like DocBook allows you to target the web, print, HTML help,
etc, but imposes structuring requirements on your content which are
easier to address at the outset of any writing/revision job than after
the fact, and the more you can build a knowledge of those structuring
requirements into your style guide, the easier it is on your writers.

One good place to see a well-evolved, community-developed web content
base that is often a pleasure to read is http://wikipedia.org . 
WikiPedia has an editorial style guide at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style

which in turn has some useful links at the bottom.

Personally, I am a big fan of FAQs, which force the writer to
anticipate the needs of readers, and are easy to write and maintain. A
well-structured, searchable FAQ, where each question links to a
relevant document, often provides an easy path into a very large and
complex set of documents around a given topic, in a form that readers
intuitively understand. Sometimes, starting with an FAQ provides
insight into how a site should be structured and where resources
should be allocated for the creation of new content; after all, you
want to give your readers what they want, and answering the questions
they already have is the best way to do so.

Best Wishes,

Paul Ford

--
words: http://ftrain.com // work: http://copywire.com