Blogs

Okay, I think I finally did it. I finished my drupal website. Drupal has been very sneaky from the beginning. It seems innocent enough once you start building it. Everything is laid out for you, in neatly organized headers on the main page: Content, Structure, Appearance...pretty straightforward. Oh, and there's only two basic content types, article and blog post. This website will basically build itself right? Wrong. So wrong.

When I was the head of security for a large company, I had to do a lot of tech writing and list making, designed for people with low reading comprehension. I don't mean that as an insult to my former employees; it's just that if I wrote simply, it was more likely people would read and understand what I was trying to tell them. After reading Chapter 9, I saw a lot of correlations between tech writing and list making for the web.

I call it PDF Panic. That's what happens to me when I'm browsing the web, click a link, and unexpectedly get a PDF. There's a little freak out in my head.

What's going on? What is it opening? Is it a virus?
Can I make this stop??

This wasn't a reason listed by Redish not to use a PDF on a website, but that's what always jump to. I'm always convinced I've gone to a bad site and it's loading something onto my machine that is going to take hours of work to sort out. My machine is my baby, and I'm lost without it.

Chapter three was a font of good advice. Every bit of it made perfect sense, and for each item Redish listed as something to avoid, I thought back to sites that I had been to. Sites that did not heed Redish's advice, sites that were creaky and difficult to navigate.

These were the main points that drew my attention:

1. Put important forms on the home page and high up on the page.
2. Put search bars at the top of the home page.
3. Don't assume full resolution on monitors.
4. Make links clear and easy.

When writing for a website, make sure the information is in layman’s terms. Letting Go of the Words tells us to keep it simple, so anyone can understand it. There are many ways to do this.

Ten guidelines for tuning up your sentences:

1. Talk to your site visitors. Use “you”

Here We Are Again

A few weeks ago I finally turned in my article for The Rapidian. If you go back a few weeks in my blogs you will see how terrified I was to turn it in the first place. I would consider myself a good writer but I'm so used to writing essays now that the idea of writing a news story almost seemed like a foreign concept to me. I've written news articles in the past but it's been few and far in between.

So naturally...