Web Write 101

• Tweet with users’ words in mind – so that Twitter’s search can find your posts
• Use the appropriate hashtag for things like conferences and events
• Link to your Twitter profile page from your website
• Choose a ‘real name’ carefully as that will be first in your <title> tag, therefore it will be very visible in the search engine’s results pages.
• You may want to put a few relevant keywords in your real name too.
• Put your main website URL in your profile.
• Add keywords to your short bio
• Write twitter posts for Retweets so that you encourage others to spread the word.
• Tweets are now indexed in real-time by Bing and Google.
• Write keyword-rich tweets if possible.
• Select the initial characters of each tweet carefully as this will be shown in the search engine results list too.
• The links you post aren’t counted towards your ranking by Google. However you should ensure that any links to your site, that use a URL shortening service, use 301 redirects in case anyone chooses to link to your pages from their site, using the shortened URL.

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.

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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.

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Here’s an introduction to SEO and social media, sometimes known as Web 2.0.

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I seem to be doing a lot of public speaking over the next few months so I thought I’d share with you an excellent article I came across by Donna M, a web writer and information architect:

10 tips for conference presentations

‘Final Curtain At The Theatre Royal’ – featuring the poetry, music and art of Billy Childish, Lupen Crook and Oliver Burgess

Recorded at the Theatre Royal in Chatham a few days before it was demolished in May 2009.

21.36 minutes long.

Final Curtain at the Theatre Royal from Dave Wise on Vimeo.

Organising web content alphabetically is such an arbitrary way to do it. It is akin to random order.

As Jared Spool says:

Alphabetization is a lazy designer’s out — it tells me that the design team isn’t interested in finding out what users are really doing on the site.

Here’s an interesting debate between Jared and some defenders of alphabetical organisation.

Your job as an editor is to make sense of the information for the reader, to effectively ‘de-randomise’, to group the mass of site information and prioritise.

The Next Woman

OK, an example of a site where they order their navigation alphabetically is The Next Woman.

The Next Woman screen grab

Look at the top right navigation scheme. They haven’t prioritised or grouped the sections. Some are obviously editorial sections – Simone’s List and Female Hero of the month. But some are admin areas – Subscribe, Contact, About. Mixing them up feels wrong. For an online mag for female internet heros they need to find an information architect or editor who understands the web for credibility sake.

Twitter is all the rage at the moment with everyone from the NHS to Number 10 Downing Street using this tool to communicate.

But recently the tool looks like becoming useful for web writers. Until early May the only way to find out what people were ‘tweeting’ about was to go to Monitter or Twitter search. Now you can see instantly what the most frequently used words are right now, just by going to your own Twitter home page. read more »