In making the conference rounds this year, we’ve noticed a lot of talk about making digital content accessible for people with all kinds of abilities and disabilities. The good news for content writers and editors is that a lot of making content accessible for screen...
Michael Gowan posts
Keeping a Style Guide Alive
Whether it’s 200 pages or two pages, most organizations have some kind of style guide. A style guide sets the standards for content—whether presented online or offline—and defines the rules and guidelines for ensuring consistency across all content. It usually...
Recycle, Reuse — and Reduce Costs
How long has your site been around — 5, 10, 20 years? Odds are, you've experienced enough turnover on your team during that time that nobody really knows all the content you have. There may even be one-off sites that were created and forgotten about. Next time you...
Who Should You Trust with Content Entry?
A website redesign can be a long, arduous process. When you finally make it to the point that your content management system is ready to be filled with the well-written, accurate, and up-to-date content you’ve spent months creating, you may feel like all the hard work...
Best of Intentions
I’ve written before about keeping the content experience clean and lean, and after every redesign project I work on, my feelings about it get stronger. (If you’re one of my kids who’s around when I start sighing and throwing my hands up, you might even say I get a...
Consistency Across Content Creators
When you’re dealing with a large-scale web redesign, you’re talking about a lot of content. And when you’re talking about a lot of content, you’re going to need more than one writer to create it all. Unfortunately, it’s never just as simple as throwing a caravan of...
Keeping it Clean and Lean
We work with many of our clients on a long-term basis – and something that comes up often is the request to add new pages to a site. This isn’t inherently bad – there are a lot of solid reasons for creating new pages. However, far too often a request for a new page...
Lost in Translation: Quality Content Matters and Other Lessons Learned
I was recently browsing cheap Bluetooth speakers and discovered that while sales for these things are huge, quality content is not high on the agenda for these companies. To wit, here's the speakerphone and suction cup description for the LESHP Pocket Mini: With the...
Asking the Right Questions
A key to a successful content project is being prepared before you begin creating anything. That means you need to ask the right questions well ahead of any content work. While the specific questions will change based on the project, here are some questions that are...