Reviewed by: Mandy Parsons

 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.

 Always a specific purpose  They want info that ◦ Answers questions/tasks ◦ Easy to find & understand ◦ Accurate, up to date, and credible  Skim & Scan

 It’s like a conversation  Answers people’s questions  Lets people grab and go

 Be careful of what you write  Successful writers focus on the audience and their specific needs

 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

 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.

 We need Pathways  What are pathways?  A pathway page is like a table of contents

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

 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

 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

 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

 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

 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

 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: