Best practices in web content publishing
Random notes, opinions, advices, and articles. Please comment!
Safeguard your online presence
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It happens all too often: an employee changes jobs; your company changes vendors. You need to update the content on your site or renew the domain name but no one knows how to access the servers or who the domain name registrar is…and suddenly you have a serious problem on your hands. Make sure that you have the keys to your domain—and other essential services and systems that make up your entire online presence.
There are as many file-naming conventions in the world as there are people naming files. In the age of content management systems, collaboration and search, it is important to have a convention and use it consistently.
Categories. Tags. User-defined tags. How many ways does the content on a site need to be sliced?! A lot. The World Wide Web is a big place with a lot of information. Users need help in finding, classifying, and sorting that information. They have come to expect it, including on your site. That’s where tags come in. Think of categories and tags as pre-defined search parameters, allowing users to quickly find what they need.
If you want your website content to be re-broadcast across the social media-verse, the easiest approach is to embed “share” buttons in your web pages. If your content is compelling enough, it will be shared and liked on Facebook, tweeted about, and bookmarked on several bookmarking services like delicious.com.
Opportunity lost: photo captions
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Spend time creating a caption to reinforce your message. Newspapers and magazines do it for a reason. When someone looks at a page, they scan headlines, look at images, and then read the captions. Don’t miss out on your last chance to make a reader out of a browser.
The basic rules of writing still apply online—know your audience, give them the information they want, in the way they need it. Keep the following five Web best practice copywriting tips in mind when writing content for your website.
As I was evaluating the content of a website for one of my clients, I noticed that she would always use the phrase “click here” when linking to another page. This is not a good practice in user interfaces.
The advent of desktop publishing technologies gave us the power to compose printed pages and screens with fonts that were once available only to typesetters who knew the rules of typography. But do we know how to set-up type?
Content management solutions (CMS) allow anybody to publish content on their website. While this is certainly an advantage, I have noticed that most of my clients make four common typographic mistakes typical of amateur publishing:
