I’ve been working on a web transformation project with work for the last few months. I introduced using Gather Content for the content creation side of things and it’s worked out really well.
I wrote about it on LinkedIn.
From chaos to calm with content creation
From chaos to calm with content creation – 3 months later
I couldn’t resist taking a photo of this. I saw it one day and it obviously stood out for me. When I saw it the next day I drove around the block to get this photo.
Not only is ‘every’ spelt incorrectly, the %25 bit got me, and the inconsistency of the lower-case l with everything else uppercase.
It made me curious as to who created it. Was it a non-English speaker or just a really bad speller?
Either way, I took notice. However it didn’t make me go in to buy.
The first time I ever had to follow a style guide (of sorts) I was working as a word processor operator at an engineering firm. My manager reiterated that there should be certain punctuation in addresses, two spaces after full-stops, and title case (ie initial capital letters) for headings. This was during the time of the typewriter being phased out and the the computer being phased in. I was using Wordstar to create documents and I wondered what this Windows software was that would enable me to copy and paste things between programs. I didn’t yet have a mouse to navigate around menus, but had to use the keyboard. The World-Wide-Web was a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eyes.
However, I digress slightly. I carried on with the two spaces after full-stops and initial caps for all words in headings for some time.
After travelling overseas for a couple of years I found temporary work doing desktop publishing where I worked with editors who had a style manual to refer to for such things. After some solid work, my habit of two spaces after full-stops and my use of initial caps was gone and I was converted to using one space after a full-stop and minimal capitalisation and I’ve been a disciple of this ever since.
I regularly, and I mean very regularly, have to correct space and capital usage in work I’m editing and I’m not usually questioned on it, but sometimes I am.
I once had a bunch of fact sheets to make accessible for the web so as part of my work I merrily did a search and replace to remove the double spaces after the full-stops. I sent the fact sheets back to the author and she questioned me on it. I explained why I did it but she was adamant that they stay in. I explained that it just wasn’t done any more because computers mostly use proportionally spaced fonts, unlike typewriters which used the same space for every letter, ie mono-spaced. Here’s more of an explanation.
We ended up meeting about this as I felt it was easier to explain in person. After this meeting I requested it be added to the internal style guide so I didn’t have to go through this again.
Having a company style guide is invaluable to show people who insist on title case capitalisation. I probably refer people to it every couple of weeks when I’m questioned.
What about you? Are you guilty of adding two spaces after full-stops?
Last week I participated in @problogger Twitter chat about content for your blog. I thought I might get some blog fodder myself out of it so decided to keep the most common themes from the chat in a Storify story so I’d have something to come back to later.
For those who haven’t used Storify it’s really easy to create a story by searching multiple social media platforms and dragging tweets, photos etc into your story.
As #pbchat (the Twitter hashtag) was super popular there were heaps and heaps of Tweets and after a while Storify just gave up collecting them for me to add. I gather there’s a limit to the amount of Tweets it can search for – around 500.
So I had to get creative about how to add tweets to my story. I did what I could using the interface on Storify but when it reached its limit the ‘Show more results’ button at the bottom of the search pane on the right simply didn’t show any more.
But, there’s a Storify bookmarklet you can drag to your bookmark bar which works in a similar way to the Pin It button for Pinterest by adding a Storify link to each tweet – see below.
Then I went to Twitter.com, searched for #pbchat, scrolled down to the Tweets that Storify wouldn’t show me and individually saved them.
You can choose to add to ‘my private collection’ or an existing published story. As I hadn’t published I added them to my private collection and in Storify added the tweets to the story.
This took a while but I was able to get the main tweets I wanted to keep. If the embedded story doesn’t show below, here it is.
I went for a job interview over a year ago now. Actually it was an informal coffee chat about an opportunity but I like the informal and think there should be more of them. They’d found me on LinkedIn and been proactive about seeking new talent which I liked. Otherwise LinkedIn hasn’t really worked that well for me. But I digress.
One of the questions I was asked was what was my favourite things about digital? Without hesitation I said that it was the content. In retrospect I wish I’d elaborated upon it a bit more as the content is important but there’s more to it than that.
I wish I’d elaborated and said that while content is important, that the strategy around the content is even more important. Maybe I didn’t have the right words at the time to verbalise it but I certainly would now.
I’ve been saying for years and years that it’s no good having a website without it being maintained. Even now it drives me mad that people must have a website but have no thought for the rest of its life.
When you’re known among friends and family for being able to put together a website you get asked quite often to help them design a website. Usually design is the operative word. I’m not a designer so thank goodness for WordPress and themes that designers and developers have already put together.
I’ve often said no, or when I’ve said yes, things have stalled because they don’t have the content or any sort of strategy for their website. I said to one relative probably about a year ago that sure, I’d help build her website, but get the content to me first and we’ll go from there. Still nothing. As it would have been a sideline project for love I haven’t chased it up.
Part of my role as a content strategist is to educate people on what having a website entails. As I focus on the content and am not a designer see here for a web design questionnaire from a designers perspective.
What is the purpose of the website? Is to sell products or services, to provide information, to increase brand awareness. The purpose of your website should be aligned with your business goals.
Who is the intended website audience? Be specific and provide as accurate a breakdown as you can.
Have you got a domain name/web address?
Website owner: Who is ultimately responsible for the website and its content?
How will the website be built? If an existing company then they probably have a content management system, otherwise there’s solutions like WordPress.
What is the information architecture of your website? How is the site going to be structured and organised.
Have you got the content for the website?
If the content isn’t ready who will be providing the content?
Will images or video be used? Do you have these?
If the website is a brand new one how will users find it? Do you have a marketing campaign around the website?
Do any links to the website need to be added on other websites?
Is there any accompanying social media to help drive traffic to the website?
Will you install code to track visitors to your website, eg Google Analytics?
What is the planned lifecyle of the website?
Who will be maintaining the website?
This is the beginnings of a content strategy around your website and definitely worth considering before you start building one.
Is there anything you would add?
I built a website for a friend recently – Papadave: not your average clown. I’m not sure why I agreed to do it. Okay, it was to help him out, and we worked out a barter system where I’d do his website and he would do some handyman jobs around the house for me.
It was easy-peasy to create the website using WordPress but then I needed content to add to it. That’s where things stalled a bit. Plus, he’s an international clown and trips overseas took him away for months at a time.
I sat down with him and worked out what the aim of his website is, and what pages he might need. There aren’t that many.
Based on this I setup the shell of the website and sitting down with him, plugged in bits and pieces that we could do straight away. I showed him how to login to WordPress, open up a page and edit it himself.
This process would go back-and-forth for a while, we’d both get busy and then we’d sit down to get back on track again. When he wasn’t overseas that is.
His wife quietly reminded him to get on with it as well I think. And another friend of ours helped him out with some of the content. If I’d been doing this as an income earner and not as an adjunct to working, I would have been on his case a lot more and things would have progressed more quickly with a project schedule in place.
It finally got done and we turned off the old website.
Now I’m reminding him that his clown diary needs more than just one entry consisting of one line.
I know this is a common occurrence. Usually when people want a website they think of the design but unfortunately not so much about the content. When I’ve been asked to create websites for others since, I ask for a brief of what they want to include on the site. I’ve gone as far as asking for the content up front too.
Anyway, if you need a clown – not an ordinary clown either – in Adelaide, or anywhere you want him to be I can tell you that I’ve seen his shows more than once and I still get a kick out of them. And he’s scored a show at my son’s vacation care these upcoming school holidays.
I think everybody who’s ever launched a website, blog or social media site has every intention of keeping it up-to-date and fresh but all too often this doesn’t happen.
Here are some ways to expand on ideas you have in regards to your online content.
I’m using Evernote to add ideas for this website. I can access it via their website, and also via the phone app. Of course you could use a paper notebook too.
Once you have a list of ideas you can use some online tools to help develop these ideas, and see what’s also of interest to others who could be searching for your topic area.
Google trends will show you what’s trending on search around the world.
You can select the country you’re in to see what’s a ‘hot search’ on any given day.
You can then narrow it down by putting in some search terms
I’m on the lookout for a dog at the moment and I’m interested in a rescue dog so I thought I’d see the interest in that.
I used ‘rescue dogs’ and then added ‘pet rescue’ to compare with it. See the spike above of the search term ‘pet rescue’. You can drill down to see why a term has the results it does and turned out that there’s a game called ‘Pet Rescue Saga’ which is most likely the reason why that search term has risen recently.
See the letters over the line graph in the results? Hover over those to see the news around that search term at that particular time.
You’re also able to search regionally. For example ‘pet rescue’ is used more in certain countries than others.
Type a question into Yahoo answers. You’ll get loads of inspiration and you’ll see what questions others are asking that might fit in with what you can also write about.
Good old Google search is one you can start typing a question or search term into and it will suggest things for you as well.
Quora is another one to check out, although you have to sign-in to use it. You can create questions yourself and add answers to questions. You can also follow people so it’s more of a search/social media site which you need to invest a bit of time into to make the most out of it.
Now that you’ve got a bunch of great ideas for your site, now you’ve got to implement them. That’s the harder part.
Where do you get your content creation inspiration from?
