A company I’ve been doing some work for asked me to run my eye over their website. They had recently handed over a serious amount of cash for a redesign and relaunch. My job was to look at the organizational structure of the site and the words they were using.

What struck me immediately was how difficult the site made it for people to contact them. There was no “contact us” page, no phone number on the front page and no obvious email address except at the end of a welcome message.

Now the actual look and feel of the site was very nice. It oozed professionalism and seemed well-suited to their target audience. But the whole incident left me wondering do web-design people ever think about the practicalities of actually using a site? After all, how obvious a mistake is it to miss off the contact details of the company?

Clearly, words matter. It’s important to provide material about who you are and what you do if you’re working in the business community. But simple words like how to get in touch matter too. Web writing isn’t just about getting your message (or material) across. It’s about making it easier to get in touch and improving the communication channel between businesses and individuals.

Maybe I’m being harsh and this was just a silly typo, but the new site’s been up almost a month and no one had noticed the contact details were missing. Now maybe no one needed to get in touch in that time. Or perhaps, people just thought “sod it” and didn’t bother to get in touch. No matter what it felt like a very serious case of “duh!”

With the traditional landscape of PR effectively having been recast by emerging social media, press releases are evolving.

Brian Solis’s guest post The Evolution of the Press Release over at TechCrunch provides an insightful overview of:

• customer-focused news releases
• traditional press releases
• SEO press releases
• and Social Media Releases.

I do think there is plenty of room for the traditional press release, as long as it is tightly focused and not too cheesy. However, as an experienced webmaster I can also see the benefit of receiving a Social Media Release that includes links to pictures and video. It’s all about being able to give the end user a more informed picture of what is going on, rather than just reproducing the spin any given PR department are trying to generate.

I filed five articles with Stockholm Universiy yesterday. They were articles intended for the new English-language website the unviersity is launching later this year.

Each piece was a profile of a researcher or international student working/studying at Frescati.

I enjoyed the work as it was interesting talking to people from different walks of life. Hell, I’ve never learned so much about cell biology in my life before.

Personal development aside, it is interesting to see the university working hard to build its international profile by commissioning a series of articles and profiles in English. I haven’t noticed the other Swedish universities like Uppsala, Lund or Gothenburg being so proactive.

It’s easy to imagine why educational organizations are targeting the internet as a way of developing their brand. You’ve got to have a strong internet presence if you’re going to get your message out. Even if you’re a university. The days of solely publishing a nice brochure are gone. And you don’t just need a brochure-website with a few nice pictures and informative text either. You need a site that’s living and shows the audience how it is to live, work and study at your university.

Interviews and profiles are a good way of doing this. You give people involved in the organization at a variety of levels to talk about the work they do and their experiences.

Add to that, writers (and project managers!) who are increasingly cognizant of targeting keywords for search engines, and you’ve got a major commitment to developing a living, growing web of text that might just bring people back to you.

I would never have imagined 20 years ago when I was starting university that one day I would end up writing copy to promote a university in the form of journalism. It’s funny peculiar how the world of words is changing.

There’s an absolutely fascinating discussion going on in the Norwegian blogosphere. Jan Arild Snoen takes Norwegian broadsheet Aftenposten to task for printing an article by journalist Tine Helen Aasen in its new magazine Innsikt [quite literally, lnsight]. The article borrows large amounts of text from a piece published the UK’s Observer on February 10, 2008.

Snoen lists point for point over twenty pieces of information Aasen has lifted from The Observer. Such is Snoen’s detective work that he even tracks down a quote Aasen gives taken straight from the Evening Standard:

Innledningsvis siteres London-kokken Aldo Zilli, som var en av de første til å slutte med flaskevann. Ingen kilde oppgis, så man kan jo forledes til å tro at Aasen har snakket med ham. Men alt han siteres på er hentet fra en artikkel i Evening Standard

[...London chef Aldo Zilli, who was one of the first to stop selling bottled water, is quoted. No source is given so you would be forgiven in thinking that Aasen had talked to him. But every word he says is taken from an article in the Evening Standard - My translation]

Olav Anders Øvrebø, freelance journalist and university lecturer at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, also mentions the incident, and is baffled that Aftenposten hasn’t commented on the matter.

I think there are a number of issues worth noting here: first and foremost, papers don’t have time to verify every piece of copy that comes across the newsdesk. Especially when it cuts across cultures and languages. No doubt Ms Aasen was trying to earn her crust and perhaps let her enthusiasm for the story, and the difficulty in tracking sources down, get in the way of solid journalistic praxis. But , let’s face it, she’s not the first journalist to recycle the news. I see this almost on a daily basis in the Swedish press. Often I read something in the British press which surfaces in DN or SvD a few weeks later.

I think the other issue here is that this demonstrates just how the Net (or bloggers!) will find you out if you’ve been a bit of a silly bugger.

Still, I wonder what The Observer make of it all? Especially Lucy Siegel, author of the original article.

Most people only skim read web pages, they don’t read them. If you don’t believe me, take it from web usability guru Jakob Nielsen.  He notes that just 11% of people will actually read a whole web page word for word to the end.

To combat this, your website needs to be tightly edited to convey your message as simply and effectively as possible.

Lengthy paragraphs will send your visitors clicking away from your website, so you need to tailor your text for the best response.  Or to put it another way: on the web ‘less is more’.

Because web users scan the page, instead of reading word by word, divide your information up into blocks that can be easily read. Successful web writers use headings and subheadings to partition content…