I’ll be writing my thoughts on web writing and web content every month.
If you have any suggestions about what themes should be covered, let me know by adding a comment to this post.
ACF interview
In June 2010 I was featured in several interviews with grant-making trusts in the Association of Charitable Foundations Journal.
Here’s a great article on Tips for setting up a website (PDF) aimed at grantmaking trusts.
LinkedIn is perfect for web writers.
Groups are essential for keeping abreast of topics.
Here’s some worthwhile LinkedIn Groups for web writers to join:
The Content Wrangler Community
Seasoned writing and editing pros
The National Union of Journalists
So, you’ve done your research: asked potential readers how they would search for the things you are writing about, consulted a thesaurus for synonyms, looked at competitors’ websites, checked out your hunches with Google’s Keyword Tool. You’ve now got a long list of words and phrases to use on your web pages.
But which keywords are best? read more »
Whenever I teach I’m often asked how I set up on my own, how I am surviving in these harsh economic times, how to set up as a self-employed web writer and designer.
These last few months have seen me work on numerous site launches, email newsletters and courses for my clients. I have never been busier. But there’s no denying that starting up is tricky when budgets are particularly tight for clients.
This is a round-up of some recent articles and forthcoming courses that look helpful, whether you’ve chosen to go freelance or are forced to be self-employed (in other words, have been made redundant).
Mashups are the combination of several data sources to create a new tailored service.
Government has the data.
Some useful mashups have been made with Government data, for example there’s a useful recycling map on Recyclenow.com.
Here’s a Google Map, made by the British Government, the UK Met Office and the British Antarctic Survey, showing the effects of global warming.
Sutton Council’s Grit Bins Map was useful a few weeks ago during the South’s heavy snow.
To help people make the most of government data, a major new website has been launched which gives free access to government data in one place: data.gov.uk
I’ll keep you posted on the innovative uses of this data. At the moment some developers are complaining that they can’t make use of the data easily.
In the meantime, here’s some of my favourite mashups:
Newsmap
Healthmap
Weatherbonk
Trendsmap
Most users don’t know what an RSS feed is. I’m putting together a site for a very non-techie audience at the moment and we will call our RSS feed a ‘News feed’. What do other sites for non-techies call them?
Google Sidewiki is a browser sidebar that lets you contribute and read information alongside any web page.
After 12 years as a tutor of courses about Web publishing, I thought I’d experienced all training calamities: a person reading The Guardian all through a course (the first time I’d taught at PTC), the Internet connection going down, the training laptop being stolen mid-way through a course, an in-company course where all the websites I needed to look at were blocked… I could go on.
Here’s an introduction to SEO and social media, sometimes known as Web 2.0.