Live tweet of a 90 minute workshop I gave at the 2015 CALM Conference in Victoria about using open source content management systems for union communicators. [View the story “Cut paste and post – open source content management systems” on Storify]
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cmkl: Another reason to hate PDFs – content curation
I really should re-brand this blog ‘Death to PDFs’. But I got an email at work from someone formerly involved in the organization who had done a vanity Google after getting an influx of spam and scam emails. She’d discovered that her contact information was “all over the internet” and
Continue readingcmkl: See? See? No one is reading your bloody PDFs
Forum One, a Washington and Seattle based digital communications consultancy has found a report on a World Bank report on… usage statistics on its own reports which are distributed in PDF. While the original document (which is, itself a PDF) steams through 32 pages of blah de blah trying to correlate
Continue readingcmkl: In defense of web content, or “don’t give me your binder and ask me to put it on the internet”
Over a yummy lunch a couple of weeks back some colleagues and I were talking about web content. They’d been at a how-to workshop where the facilitator seemed to have got it in their heads that putting any more than 150 words on any given page was verbotten. “I like
Continue readingcmkl: Death to the FAQ: Lisa Marie Martin is totally right
Thanks to Renée Stephen I know I’ve not been suffering alone all these years in my hatred of FAQs. She showed me (via Twitter) this very well put case against having FAQs on websites. Below is the comment I wrote in response.
Continue readingcmkl: On the occasion of the website re-launch
So today marked the finale of a two year campaign to re-design, re-engineer and re-everything the flagship website where I work. And after the most excruciating day of bickering about DNS changes, being incredulous about block translation bugs, and general angst, this was waiting for me at home. My heart
Continue readingcmkl: Seventy five pages today
There were a bunch of other things I was doing today, but I got through seventy five pages. Of content inventory. Without falling asleep. Are you impressed? Me neither. Ah well.
Continue readingcmkl: So I’m doing this content inventory at work
I hit 400 pages today. I’m maybe 25 per cent of the way there. If I had my druthers I think about 380 of them would be kept near-line if not deleted. Of course I’m working my way through a part of the site that’s rife with disposable content. Namely
Continue readingcmkl: What does it mean to ‘scan’ web content?
Trying to use numbers to settle an argument today at work I found this (somewhat old) Jakob Nielsen column about how much reading most people actually do on the internet. The answer? Of the words you write, about 28 per cent on average get read.
Continue readingcmkl: Bullet lists are good. But don’t believe me – look at this
Such a simple thing, really, a bullet list. A visual cue in the text to indicate an organized collection of symmetrically arranged bits of information. Ideas organized like merchandise on a shelf – there for the taking. What’s not to like?
Continue readingcmkl: Rethinking content strategy – I don’t do design like I used to either
In about 2000 I had this crazy idea that if you made a simple cut paste and post system and hosted it on the web server, anyone could be a web content creator. I had just started a new job and in talking to my co-workers and to people in
Continue readingcmkl: Writing web content for union members: is it public voice or intimate voice?
Most of the how-to manuals on web writing focus on writing in public voice. They presume that the words will be the product of many pairs of eyes, the writer being only the first. Editors, revisors, approvers, translators etc. It’s a safe assumption be…
Continue readingcmkl: Good web content is not about writing “punchy”
And in fact, that headline breaks another cardinal rule about web writing. You’re supposed to write positively – what things are, what you will do as opposed to what they aren’t and what you won’t.
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