Web Creative

I’ve been doing a slightly simpler versions of what this article from A List Apart is calling ‘content templates’ for quite sometime now.  I call them ‘content requirements documents’ and they pretty much follow what is described in the article (excluding the pre written sample content).  It was the only way we could get the right content, in the right format, and correct quanity from clients.

Even if it still takes an age and a day to get the actual content, you (or your copy editor) at least then don’t spent a week appropriatley reformating and organizing large sways of text.

Five Things you should know about writing web content

Excellent and thorough list of pre-flight checks.

Nothing revolutionary here, but some good tips non-the-less.  Tip 4 (Write to a flowchart) is a good idea that I’ll be keeping in mind.  Tip 2 (Write for a low literacy audience), doesn’t sit well with me. Write in plain english and don’t use lots of buzzwords and acroymns yes, but I’m not a fan of dumbing things down.  I think you should write for the audience that is the target market for the site not some general “low literacy” user with a reading age of 11-12 years old - unless that is your target market.