Writing Blogger

The quandary is pretty much the same across websites. The kinds of content that really grab our attention as readers of print publications and viewers of television and movies are narratives, stories with a beginning, middle and an end. But online, content is almost never expressed that way — for business and commercial sites, anyway.
So […]

Summaries at the top of your Web pages enhance the usability of your site by giving users a way to quickly understand what content will be displayed on a Web page, and whether it is relevant to them.
As Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen has written many times, Web users don’t like to spend any more […]

That’s the surprising conclusion — to say the least — from a new eyetrack study released this week from the Poynter Institute at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference.
Among the findings were that when Web users read a story online, on average they read 77 percent of the story, compared to 62 percent for […]

Crikey!!! I’ve been away for two weeks now from the blog, so please pardon the lack of posts. I’ll be back on top of things soon, as I’ve been a little underwater with work (a good problem to have, I’m sure you’d agree).
In the meantime, check out this news from Google on their new pay-per-transaction […]

There’s a must-read article on SiteProNews’s Web site about what the drive to create SEO-friendly copy has done to the quality and readability of content all over the Web, and the seemingly casual disdain many writers and site publishers have for their readers.
The writer (Karon Thackston) has plenty of really helpful things to say and […]

As soon as I was finished typing the headline above, I realized I probably should’ve asked the question “what makes a great Web page?” We probably all know, in a general sense, what makes for good Web copy — shorter, more concise copy, with plenty of headers and subheaders to break up blocks of text […]

Don’t know about you, but the weather outside sure makes potential distractions outside the house less appealing on days like this. No wonder I’m getting more work done!!
In the meantime, I’m also checking out some new business writing blogs (well, they’re new to me, anyway) that are worth a look. Here’s a few:
Business Writing Blog […]

There’s a great discussion going on over at MediaBistro.com that’s titled “The Most Grueling Job in Media” but which has developed into a discussion about the high-stress, 24-7 demands of working in the publishing industry today (or really any highly competitive industry today, for that matter).
It really got me thinking — how do you, as […]

You’ve probably come across this in your career oh, probably a thousand times or so. You’re reading a deliverable document or white paper for a project or initiative within your company, and the size of the document is the thing you notice the most about it. When I used to work in consulting, it was […]

I’m afraid I took a much more extended break from blogging than I intended, and it’s already a little over a month since my last post. I’ll be posting more in this section very soon, on some business writing topics that all of us encounter whether we work full-time or on a freelance basis for […]