All Writing the Web posts

Presenting poems and other valuable content

Don’t worry, you don’t have to like poetry. You don’t even have to know who or what Carol Ann Duffy or a Poet Laureate is. This is about valuing content in the way that you present it on your web site so that your readers will value it too.

Here’s what happened. Carol Ann Duffy is a talented British poet. She wrote a topical and smart little verse about David Beckham being ruled out of the World Cup because of an Achilles’ injury. The Mirror, one of the UK’s tabloid newspapers, published it exclusively on its web site last week.

And that’s where it went Goldenballs up:

Are you stupid enough to use leverage as a verb?

Let me make two things clear. Firstly, language is organic. It grows and changes. Words pass out of usage, or take on new meanings. New words are invented for new objects and concepts. People who want language to remain as it is, frozen at the point that they did their English degrees, are probably afraid [...]

You are your web site

I want to give you money. Imagine it. I want to give you money – by signing up to become a paying member on your web site. So I find your site and look for the quickest, easiest way to get to the sign up page. But I can’t find it. Sometimes you’re talking about [...]

How to blog consistently (note to self)

Happy new year everyone.

I have one goal for SmyWord this year: to blog more consistently.

Last year was great – launching SmyWord, having a couple of big content cheeses drop by in the comments, receiving positive feedback from customers. But if I could change one thing, I wished I had upheld my promise to post a new article once a week.

Increasingly businesses I do content work for want blogs on their web sites. A real, honest blog by someone who loves their work is a wondrous thing (especially if they’re not meta-careerists). And one of the fundamental pieces of advice I give them – one of the make-or-break keys to successful blogging – is to blog consistently.

Crap camera no excuse for bad indoor photos

Oh the joy of content strategy for smaller web sites! One minute I’m immersed in The Maldives’ most magnificent resorts, the next in a portal for plumbers in Portsmouth. This work is certainly diverse. For example, I’ve just written a guide for a letting agent to help them to take better photographs of their properties. [...]

Time to squish the double space

Have you ever shared a room at night with a mosquito?

Tiny things can ruin what should be a straightforward experience. Don’t deal with the mosquito, and you’re in for a bad night’s sleep at best. Leave a spelling mistake on your web site because it seems insignificant to you – and it’s your customers who will be complaining and not coming back.

Writing great copy involves not only choosing the right words, but also caring how those words appear. Font choice and size, line length, punctuation, paragraph length – all these are part of the readers’ experience of your message.

Many of these decisions are subjective. How much space to leave between sentences, for example: surely it is up to the author to decide what is most fitting?

Yes, and no.

Content strategy: as boring as it sounds?

The almost constant complaint from Content Strategists is that content is undervalued. Many clients don’t seem to realise that once they have got something to offer, the first thing is to find a way to say it (how about on a web site, for example?). Instead, they want new web sites first and then they [...]