Resources for editors and writers of websites
Note: This page is out of date but will be updated soon.
This “starter list” was originally compiled for a presentation on editing websites given at the Australian Society for Technical Communication (ASTC) annual conference in Sydney, NSW, Australia on 30 October 1998. Several of the sites listed have quite extensive lists of links to further information.
Links on this page are updated occasionally, and new listings are added.
See also my pages on technical writing and editing books, especially the page on Web pages and Web sites.
Style Guides and Writing Guides
Tim Berners-Lee’s CERN Style Guide (A bit out of date, but still excellent information.)
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/Introduction.html
Gareth Rees’s Style Guide (Very useful; intended as a supplement to Berners-Lee’s guide.) No longer available on Web, but an abridged version appears as Appendix 2 in Crawford Kilian’s book, Writing for the Web (see my review).
Sun Microsystem’s Style Guide (Not specifically web-related; an excellent overall style guide. This link leads to more information about the book, which does not appear to be available online.)
http://www.sun.com/books/catalog/EdStyle/index.html. To order from Amazon, click here.
World Wide Web Style Manual (Yale)
http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/contents.html. Also available in book form as “Web style guide: Basic design principles for creating Web sites”, by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton, Yale University Press, 1999. Review. To order from Amazon, click here.
Techniques for Writing Good Web Documents
http://www.gooddocuments.com/Techniques/techniqueshome_m.htm
An extensive list of specific do’s and don’ts, with examples. Many of these tips are familiar to technical communicators but are often news to other writers. Includes a good discussion on when and how to use frames.
Writing for the Web, http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/
Writing for the Web (not related to website listed above)
by Crawford Kilian, Self-Counsel Press, 1999. Review. To order from Amazon, click here.
Editing a Website: Extending the Levels of Edit
http://www.theprices.com/4artTW1.htm
Describes lessons learned by a university editing class when they attempted to edit a website created by others. Far from being a simple text-editing project, it turned into a major overhaul of the site, dealing with screen design, coding, interface issues and interactivity. The Levels of Edit concept provided a framework for the work.
Usability
Web Review collection of articles, http://webreview.com/
Jared Spool’s User Interface Engineering site, http://world.std.com/~uieweb/
Jacob Nielsen’s “Alertbox”, http://www.useit.com/alertbox
An ongoing series on topics such as “How users read on the Web”, “Why Web users scan instead of read”.
Enabling Extremely Rapid Navigation in your Web or Document, by Michael Hoffman, 21/3/96
http://www.pdr-is.com/infoaxcs.htm (address no longer valid)
The case for long documents; and a discussion of information access mechanisms such as a table of contents and index.
Usable Web: Guide to Resources about Web Usability
http://usableweb.com/about/index.html
Accessibility
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (W3C Recommendation 5-May-1999)
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/
A detailed discussion of guidelines that page authors should follow in order to make their pages more accessible for people with disabilities as well as more useful to other users, new page viewing technologies (mobile and voice) and electronic agents such as indexing robots.
Webzines & Lists Devoted to Writing and Editing
Homesite Journal (formerly Web Site Journal)
http://members.aol.com/hmtwnpromo/archive/archive.htm
A collection of tips and tricks (for example, “Create descriptive title tags” and “Registering redirected pages”), plus interviews with industry analysts and others.
Meta Tags, Keywords, Search Engines and More
Search Engines Features Chart
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/features.html
A comparison chart of the major search engines and the factors that affect if and when a page is indexed. Includes a clear beginners’ explanation of each factor, including a discussion of meta tags and keywords.
Miscellaneous
Web Design links at About.com, http://webdesign.about.com/
Internet Resources for Technical Writers: Web Publishing
http://www.soltys.ca/techcomm/wwwpub.html
Editing Web Sites presentation
Last updated 26 September 2002