Table of contents
Click on the following image to see thumbnails
of some of the pages of this manual.
1. Best-practice online writing 1
1.1 Know your audience and their needs 1
1.2 Keep it short 5
1.3 Scannability 10
1.4 Credibility 18
1.5 Great FAQs 22
1.6 Great About us pages 23
1.7 Things that users hate 24
1.8 The Ten Best Intranets Award for 2007 25
1.9 Chapter summary 26
2. Turning useability into return on investment 27
2.1 How do we justify all this work? 27
2.2 Useability equals sales 27
2.3 Intranets, government and non-profit web sites 28
3. When to use multimedia 30
3.1 When to use images 30
3.2 The use of images in some local sites 31
3.3 When to use movies, Flash, Shockwave etc. 33
3.4 When to use e-mail attachments 35
4. E-mail that gets results 36
4.1 Understand why you're writing 36
4.2 Structuring and formatting e-mail 36
4.3 Descriptive codes in your subject line 38
4.4 Replying 39
4.5 Minimising time spent with e-mail 39
4.6 Sometimes a meeting is just better 40
4.7 Save a draft and wait before sending it 41
4.8 Avoid emotion 41
4.9 Plain text or HTML e-mail? 42
4.10 Is your e-mail mistaken for spam? 44
4.11 Other e-mail recommendations 45
4.12 Chapter summary 46
5. Effective e-newsletters 47
5.1 E-newsletters build relationships 47
5.2 A big benefit 49
5.3 Linking to your web or intranet sites 51
5.4 Chapter summary 51
6. Plain English for online writing 52
6.1 Why is plain English so important online? 52
6.2 What is it? 52
6.3 Use one word, not several 54
6.4 Avoid pompous, pretentious writing 56
6.5 Eliminate buzzwords and unnecessary jargon 58
6.6 Tone: first-person pronouns and contractions 61
6.7 Use short sentences 64
6.8 Use fewer acronyms 65
6.9 Use the active voice 66
6.10 Avoid drawing attention to the medium 69
6.11 Chapter summary 69
7. Quality control 71
7.1 Introduction 71
7.2 Consistency 71
7.3 Correctness and credibility 72
7.4 Currency 73
7.5 Legality issues 74
7.6 Privacy issues 75
8. Essential online punctuation 76
8.1 Full stops 77
8.2 Colons (:) 79
8.3 Semicolons (;) 81
8.4 Commas 85
8.5 Apostrophes 92
8.6 Bulleted and numbered lists 95
8.7 How should I punctuate a list? 97
8.8 What is parallel structure? 99
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TESTIMONIAL
"Tim, the book was excellent. So many of the how-to writing books available today are awful. I find yours are not only inspirational but they contain excellent information, wisdom and advice.
There's an awful lot of pontificating twaddle written by people on the subject of writing -- and I think your writing stands out as being head and shoulders above the rest."
Iona Lister
