Five Simple Steps

Creating Web Content

By Relly Annett-Baker

Content is still the fly in the ointment of so many websites. It seems like an insurmountable task to create it or, worse still, to cajoule it from reluctant clients. This book has a simple methodology for finding, creating, adapting and curating web content from the mighty homepage to the microcopy on a form field. It is written for people who create small to medium size web projects and is full of practical exercises, time saving processes and insights from beyond the web.

Creating Web Content

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Table of Contents

PART 1 - INTRODUCING CONTENT

  • Your website sucks
  • Giving content its due
  • Practical tools for content creation
  • Content as a process
  • Big Content vs little content

PART 2 - PLAN IT

  • Know your audience
  • Know your content - audits for profit and pleasure
  • Styleguides
  • Styleguides for guiding authors
  • Styleguides for style
  • Workflow
  • Designing with content will make you happy

PART 3 - CREATE IT

  • Writing - a cheat's guide
  • Task based content and game design theory.
  • Microcopy - the world's easiest adventure game
  • Classic pages
  • About
  • Homepage
  • 404/500
  • Contact us
  • Visual language and tricks of vocabulary

PART 4 - CARE FOR IT

  • Healthy content is happy content
  • Search - let's be friends again
  • Leaving search engines to do the work is insulting to people trying to find you.
  • metadata - the web's library system
  • Testing and Tweaking
  • out-of-context testing
  • A/B and Multivariate
  • user testing
  • Content analysis is an ongoing process.
  • Taking the lead with the content conversation.

PART 5 - TRY IT

  • A practical content strategy in action
  • Planning a personal site refresh
  • Exercise for auditing
  • Exercise for styleguide creation
  • Possible content ideas
  • Creating a workflow for new content
  • Creating content for your site
  • Exercise for about page
  • Exercise for contact page
  • Exercise for 404 page
  • Exercise for microcopy / interaction copy.
  • Conclusion - Rework, remix, refresh.

Recent Blog Post

The story of our shipping

Posted on April 27, '12 by Emma Boulton.

Once upon a time at Five Simple Steps we lovingly packed every book order by hand: We unloaded each and every box of books from the pallets and unpacked them in our studio. We printed out the order from our system and cross-checked with Pa...

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