Archive for the 'Content Writing' Category
Open Web Vancouver opens with a Pirate Party and a look at Women in Open Source
I must confess, I wasn’t expecting much from the Open Web Vancouver conference. I read the schedule, and perhaps the strong emphasis on Drupal turned me off, but I didn’t find myself salivating like I do when I go to An Event Apart’s website. And as the saying goes, you pay for what you get; so how good can a $150 conference be? Today’s conference proved me wrong.
This morning’s session was opened by two keynote speakers and left me inspired and eager to learn more about the Open Source community.
The first keynote was given by Rick Falkvinge on one of Sweden’s political party, the Pirate Party, whose platform is to reform laws regarding copyrights and patents and other civil liberties issues. The Pirate Party succeeded in gaining popularity and attention simply by using the Internet and very little money. In fact their campaign budget during the last election consisted of only $50K. As a result of the communication tools and methods they’ve used, they are now the political party with the largest percentage of voters 30 years old and younger. This of course as alarmed other politicians who have never been able to reach out to this age group.
Now that the Pirate Party has secured a seat in the European Parliament, it will be interesting to see if other political parties start discussing issues such as privacy and file sharing. Just like Al Gore has put Global Warming on everyone’s mind, Rick Falvinge is spreading the word about what needs to be done to create a better online world for all of us and he deserved the standing ovation which followed his presentation.
Following this great keynote, came Angie Byron who spoke about Women in Open Source or rather lack of. I was a bit surprised that this topic was chosen and discussed. I’ve been working as a so called “geek” for a over a decade and never experienced any sexism at work or conference and Angie admitted herself that until she started researching the numbers, didn’t think there was a problem either. Turns out the percentage of women in Open Source is staggeringly low. The reasons and solutions that were discussed were obvious and applicable to all minorities, not just women. At least they felt obvious to me, but a few hours later, I read about the incident at Flashbelt’s conference just a few days ago. It seems like a lot of boys think that the saying boys will be boys still stands and should simply be accepted.
Angie provided great advice on how to create a safe and inviting community and how to stop tolerating bullshit. The gem, for me, were her views on contribution to Open Source. Having worked with Open Source during all of my coding years, I’ve realised that I’ve used the stuff, but never really contributed. Providing contribution whether it be marketing, documenting, designing and of course coding, is a great way to empower yourself and feel like you are part of the team.
I look forward to learn more during tomorrow’s event.
How to create a privacy policy
When building websites, I am given all of the website content, but more often than not, the privacy policy is not part of this document. As a result I end up looking at the current site and copying the existing text or searching the web for inspiration and writing something brief for the client.
If you are collecting any type of information from your website, such as email for a newsletter or comments on your blog, then you should have a privacy policy in place. But what do you put in there?
Creative Commons
Worried that your good work could be plagiarised or that someone’s going to steal your thunder on the Internet and not reference your writing appropriately? There’s a solution to every problem and this one comes in the form of Creative Commons. An offshoot of a US non profit organisation, Creative Commons was founded in 2003 with the help of the University of Ottawa Law and Technology Program and the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.
The service allows you to license your work easily and at no cost. With various different license offerings based on how much freedom you want to give people to use your writing and in which forums, Creative Commons steps you through an easy process to find the right license and then you simply download some HTML to your web-site and your covered like so:
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License
People using the works are then morally and legally obliged to use them accordingly (or not at all if you so choose). Whether or not people act appropriately remains to be seen and there’s also the issue of the global reach of the Internet with different laws governing different jurisdictions but if this plagiarism is a concern for you then Creative Commons is definately a step in the right direction to protecting your work.
Highlights from An Event Apart Seattle
One of the things I love about being a web designer is that there is always more to learn, be it from other web specialists or your clients. Last week at An Event Apart Seattle Christine and I had the chance to learn from some true experts. The speakers were not only masters in their fields, but engaging and generous with their knowledge.
Here are some highlights:
- Watching Eric Meyer write CSS (you know you’re a geek when…)
- Jeffrey Zeldman’s talk on “Writing the User Interface” confirmed my experience: the words in a web design matter much more than you might think and can really make a difference in how visitors use your site. So long as it invites clicking, it matters more what a button says than what it looks like.
- Peaking into other designer’s processes, from beautiful sketchbooks to user research.
- I enjoyed Jeff Veen’s succinct message which shows the benefits of doing your design research up front vs. the cost of changing your mind partway through the build. He also discussed why web design is so much more complex now than it was in the early days of the web, when everyone using the web were of the same type (geeks).
- Shawn Henry shared insights for ensuring your site is accessible to varying abilities; from folks who read the web with braille or speech readers to limited vision users — who magnify screens to an amazing degree, but want the same site that was designed for regularly sighted users. Bottom line: there is no substitute for engaging disabled users in the design process if you want to build truly accessible sites. Her book on accessibility is free online.
- Andy Budd shared how a delightful user experience is worth more than the sum of it’s parts in the loyalty that can create.
Not keen on copywriting? Satire works well at TeamSnap
Testimonials on a website can sometimes be a bit cheesy and even look suspicious. Can you really believe what these people are saying? Via Mike Davidson I discovered TeamSnap. TeamSnap allows you to manage your game and team schedules and communicate with your teammates. Not only is this site great to look at, very well designed and well laid out, the testimonials are hilarious. Whoever wrote this had a blast.
Linking is the Foundation of Every Quality Website
Want to write better Web copy? You’ll be off to a good start if your follow Gerry McGovern’s advice.
Free Keyword Suggestion Tool
When your potential customers search the web, what keywords are they searching for? Wordtracker has launched a free Keyword Suggestion Tool that can help you determine the best search-engine friendly words to use on your site. It has two key benefits:
- lists some similar phrases which, used on your site, increase your chances of showing up when those customers are searching
- estimates how often people search for keyword phrases
Try it out – you might be surprised how a little word-tweaking will make your site more relevant to how customers are thinking.
Cheap at Heart: Search Optimization
Web Content Management consultant and author, Gerry McGovern offers us these valuable tips when writing website content with search engine optimization in mind.
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The Web is Changing how we Write and Read
Who would have thought that the emergence of the Web would have initiated a text revolution? Never before have so many people read and written so much.
Now that the Web is fifteen years old, Web Content Management consultant and author, Gerry McGovern looks at how the Web has changed the way we read and write.
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What updates can you make to keep your website fresh?
Keeping your website up-to-date is essential. Not only does it give you credibility, it also increases your chance of repeat visits and helps with search engine optimization. Here are a few ways to keep your content fresh:
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