5 tips for editing web content

Georgina Hibberd

1. Know your audience and purpose

• What is the context of this piece?

• Who is my audience?

• What is this site trying to say?

2. Be ruthless

• Aim to cut content by at least third

• Don’t be precious

• Respect the feelings of others but don’t let them get in the way of decent web content

3. Use the return/enter key

• Always be thinking about how you can chunk the content

• Too many paragraphs are never enough

4. Be pedantic

• Not all rules can be broken

• Pay attention to grammar and fix typos

• Not knowing your ‘their’ from your ‘there’ is not a good look

5. Give them more

• Add context

• Don’t just talk about it, link to it

• Remove URLs and use plain words in link labels

Example:

The research activities of this group are

diverse. Some aspects of the team’s interest

investigate the inter-relationships amongst

physical disability, exercise capacity and

degree of handicap in cardiac and neurologic

populations. Another focus is upon exercise

training and functional rehabilitation utilising

assistive technologies.

The research activities of this group are

diverse. They include:

• the relationships between physical disability, exercise capacity and degree of handicap in cardiac and neurologic populations

• exercise training and functional rehabilitation using assistive technologies.

What I did:

• Removed ‘extra’ words

• Simplified words

• Broke it up into bullet points

What I didn’t do:

Cut some terms that may have

otherwise been removed, due to the

content and audience of the text.