Reviewed by: Mandy Parsons

1. Reviewed by: Mandy Parsons

2. Goal of the book • High quality content • Easy navigation • Planning, selecting, organizing, writing, illustrating, reviewing, and testing content that meets people’s needs giving them a satisfying web experience.

5. Content! Content! Content! • Always a specific purpose • They want info that • Answers questions/tasks • Easy to find & understand • Accurate, up to date, and credible • Skim & Scan

6. What makes writing for the web work well? It is good web writing… • It’s like a conversation • Answers people’s questions • Lets people grab and go

7. Your Audience • Be careful of what you write • Successful writers focus on the audience and their specific needs

8. 7 steps to understanding your audience • List your major audience • Gather info about each • List major characteristics for each • Gather questions, tasks, & stories • Create personas • Include the persona’s goals & tasks • Write scenarios

9. To have a successful experience on a site, people have to… • Find what they need • Understand what they find • Act appropriately on that understanding Most importantly they have to do this in a reasonable time and effort that they think is worth it.

10. So to do this… • We need Pathways • What are pathways? • A pathway page is like a table of contents

11. Pathways • Group words into sections • Ex. L.L. Bean • Describe links • Ex. Bank of America • Make links from pathway pages easy to understand

12. Breaking down your topic into categories • Skim and scan vs. reading • There is a limit as to how much content you put on the page • Main point for the length of content is understanding how much time people will take to read

13. Tuning Up Your Sentences • When you write you should remember: • To picture the people/personas • What you would say to them while on the phone • Reply to them as if you were actually talking on the phone

14. Using Tables • 9 guidelines for writing useful web lists • Use lists to make info easy to grab • Keep most lists short • Format lists to make them work well • Match bullets to your site’s personality • Use numbered lists for instructions • Turn paragraphs into steps • Give even complex instructions • Keep the sentence structure in lists parallel • Don’t number list items if they are not steps and people might confuse them with steps

15. Using Lists • 6 guidelines for creating useful web tables • Use tables when you have numbers to compare • Use tables for a series of “if, then” sentences • Think about tables as answers to questions • Think carefully about what to put in the left column of the table • Keep tables simple • Format tables on the web so that people focus on the info and not on the lines

16. Getting from Draft to Final Web Pages • Tips on how to polish your final web pages • Think of writing as revising drafts • Review and edit your own work • Ask colleagues and others to read and comment • Put your ego in the drawer • Work with a writing specialist or editor • Make reviews work for you and your web site visitors

17. What’s the overall message of this book? • People don’t want to READ along the way!!! • They only want to find what they are looking for and even then they don’t want to read a whole lot. • I would give this book: