Summary
Customized training for creative and editorial staff who are responsible for content on your site. Covers the elements necessary for creating a style guide, tone, and how to manage content.
- Help your team understand how online writing differs from print
- Cover best practices for online writing using examples from your own content
- Course outline follows structure of a writing style guide; can be used as the basis for your own style guide
- Inclusive, encouraging approach to online writing ensures all team members leave feeling energized
Details
The exercises that attendees work through during the day constitute a high-level style guide outline. They cover the essential elements of page and site design. The class constantly links guidelines back to user behavior in order to explain why we make specific recommendations, and to help you choose the correct options for your site.
You may invite as many attendees as you would like. Inviting more than the core team turns this into more of a classroom training session than a workshop as opportunities for interaction are reduced.
Before the session, we work with you to examine existing site content and identify both good and not-so-good examples of content. We also analyze existing procedures and process documentation (style guides, tone documents, etc.). Elements of these documents and content examples are then incorporated into the presentation and exercises so that attendees learn from highly relevant examples.
The structure of the day can be varied to suit your requirements. Best practices, psychological and cognitive science findings and published research are all introduced to drive points home and to give attendees an understanding of the background to certain points, but the tone of the day remains practical throughout. The aim is to help all present become better writers in the online medium.
Topic highlights include
- Why online is different from print
- Site structure and organization
- Different navigation types to consider
- How to split content
- Page structure and organization
- Optimizing the impact of each page element
- Expected locations for different information types
- Writing for re-use
- Writing to be found – considering search engines
- Search engines are like humans – really!
- Tips for different content types
- Social Media: blogs, Twitter, etc.
- Help and instructional text
- Product pages
- Corporate/About Us
- Press releases
- PDFs (and when to use them)
- Tone – the personality of your site
- Getting readers to do what you ask
- Other media
- Guidelines for useful graphics
- Incorporating sound and video
- Incorporating multimedia content
- Making your life easier
- How to work with content providers
- Dealing with existing pages, taking charge of bad content
- Content Management System (CMS) tweaks to save you time
- Justifying content re-work: metrics and Return On Investment (ROI) calculations
- How to enjoy your job more
Deliverables
Customized session handouts are provided in advance in PDF format for you to print and distribute to attendees on the training day.
We give the organizer a “next steps” document with tips to ensure that momentum generated during the class is harnessed and used for maximum benefit.
Licensing terms are available if you would like to use this content for subsequent in-house training sessions.
A two-day version of this class is also available which spends more time in workshop style sessions with the aim of guiding the participants towards creation of their own style guide.
Price: US$ 9,000 – see our Pricing page for more information
Duration: 1 day
Prerequisites: Access to site, or you provide screen shots/content examples for customization of class.
Next steps
To find out more and to discuss how this class can benefit your group, talk to us by e-mail: info@ [this site’s domain]