It didn’t really catch on.

But I did succeed in amusing myself.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Most Interesting Technical Writer in the World:

• Her brain is widely considered the world’s most reliable version control system.
• What he sees is really what he gets.
• Tim O’Reilly cried for 3 weeks when she took him off her Christmas card list.
• He once explained agile development by means of a single haiku.
• Spell checkers run all their emails through her.
• Larry Wall once admitted that there’s really only one way to do it—her way.

That’s all I got. You have any? Add them in the comments!

And in case you live in a cave, here’s the inspiration for this meme, courtesy of Dos Equis:

I kept thinking about the implications of this article: how you could use a low-PageRank site to basically sniff out search terms that are in higher demand than their keyword competition would indicate.

That inspired me.

Not to set up an auxiliary site, necessarily. Just to execute some of my content ideas that had been simmering. The most exciting of which was a guide to family activities in Houston called The Lark.

I had the idea for the Lark when I realized that my area’s most popular local events publication for parents was… in print. At the same time, my local moms’ Yahoo! group served as a repository for our cobbled-together lists of all the relevant seasonal events.

I thought, why is there no blog listing these things?

I looked for one but didn’t find it. So I did what any good web writer and content strategy enthusiast would do. I hired a designer (my friend, the amazing Shanna Cote) and got to work creating content I would want to read.

The site is by no means “auxiliary”, and I hope it gains PageRank (and traffic). But it is mine… all mine. I’m having great fun figuring out things like:

• Setting my own editorial calendar — Although I’ve worked in journalism as a stringer, I don’t have a formal journalism background. And my tech writing job has me scheduling documentation according to our product development cycle. Setting and executing my own editorial calendar is different. It requires me to generate ideas regularly, time them appropriately, and—most importantly—post them. All while keeping the content relevant and engaging to a specific audience.
• Analytics — I’ve used Google Analytics for a while, but it’s time to delve into the nitty gritty. Entrance and exit paths, goals, optimizing on-site search, taking advantage of the surprising keywords that I end up ranking for… I can get as tweaky as I want.
• UX — It’s not a complicated site, but if I don’t take care of the details, like creating a decent 404 page, no one will. (And yes, the 404 page is on the to-do list!)
• Editorial and privacy policies — I’ve never had to create and publish any type of “policy” before. But if I expect to build trust, I have to include these messages on the site.
• Social sharing — Anyone who knows me knows I’m a little too into social media. But can I successfully drive traffic to this site using my existing social tactics? I’m already learning quite a bit about how my readers use (or don’t use) social media, and what works for them.
• Content marketing tactics — I cannot wait to try A/B testing. Offering free downloads in exchange for email newsletter subscriptions is another content marketing tactic I haven’t had a chance to try yet.

I’ve found some great resources to help in my blogging efforts, not the least of which is John Saddington’s Tentblogger site. John’s a web developer, but he has the mind of a content strategist. Anyone who blogs can benefit from his wisdom.

In short, this project is forcing me to look at a lot of aspects of content strategy that I haven’t necessarily had to before.

It’s the same old content strategy story, really — making content findable, readable, engaging, shareable, and usable.

But The Lark is my own personal content strategy laboratory. And that’s what excites me.

What content experiments are you working on?

Deck chair from the Titanic. (Photo from Accidental Hedonist on Flickr.)

Imagine, if you will, a conversation:

Joe: Hey Sam, can you take a look at this new form for our website? I need your wordsmithing expertise.

Sam: Sure, buddy.

Joe: Great. Here are my questions. Should “Shipping Policy” be capitalized in “Read our Shipping Policy for more details”? Also, should we italicize it, since it’s name of a page? Or use double quotation marks?

Sam: Great questions, pal! Hmm, let’s see. (Clicks around to a few online authorities.) Looks like this expert recommends downstyle—so let’s capitalize “Shipping,” but not “policy.” And this other expert suggests we use bolding instead of italics. Does that help?

Joe: Yes! Thank you! I knew you’d know where to find the answers.

Sam: Sure thing, chum. But—hang on. I see a line on this form I don’t completely understand. “Enter whirligig code for cretacious widget.” What does that mean?

Joe: (Shrugs.) I dunno. The developer put it in there, so I figure it’s there for a reason. (Walks away.)

Sam: (Scratches head.)

Wow, you’re thinking. What an odd exchange! That wouldn’t happen in real life. It’s so silly.

And yet. And yet.

It happens to me far too often. A client or co-worker will express great concern over a fine detail like punctuation, and complete obliviousness to huge problems with readability and coherence. I see both writers and non-writers do this.

Our obsession with syntax

Of course, I’m familiar with the idea of folks being consumed by a passion for syntax. I am those folks, after all. I’m a punctuation obsessive. I’ve read Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.

Then, a month ago, I really took notice.

In my SXSW presentation on March 11, as I spoke about how non-writers can get better at writing, I showed some examples of what I think is pretty decent web copy written by designers. A couple of the examples had typos in them. I didn’t think it was a big deal.

Some in my audience disagreed.

One woman took me aside afterward and strongly cautioned me against such syntactical insouciance. “It destroys credibility!” she said. Others said the same thing via Twitter.

What I’m not saying

Look, anyone who knows me at all knows there’s nothing I love better than a good grammar debate. I wrote an entire blog post about how typos make you look like a hack. I freaked out when a co-worker innocently declared that a period should always precede two spaces. I have a long history of sticking up for the serial comma.

I’m not saying that punctuation and grammar don’t matter. For goodness’ sake. As if we needed web content to be messier.

I’m just saying it’s not the most important thing. And sometimes, we treat it as if it is.

Leave those deck chairs alone; the boat is sinking

I know you don’t want to hear this. But I’m going to say it anyway:

• When was the last time you were really confused by a misplaced comma?
• When was the last time you saw a hyphen instead of an em-dash, and you left the site in frustration?
• When was the last time a missing Oxford comma cost you money?

For me, the answer is “not recently, if ever.”

Now,

• When was the last time unclear writing confused you, and you left the site in frustration?
• When was the last time you couldn’t understand what a web form was asking for?
• When was the last time you couldn’t find a web page because the site’s navigation was poorly labeled?

Was it last week? Yesterday? This morning? Five minutes ago? Because if I know anything, it’s that those of us who spend any time on the web have these problems daily.

Daily.

Why do we do this? Why do we argue about leading, apostrophes, and Comic Sans, when we don’t even understand what our words are trying to communicate?

1. We do it because it’s easy

For us word-nerdy types, it’s easy to remember the rules in English that govern apostrophes. Simple. Black and white. We see a sign that says “Kellys’ Bakery” and we snicker because our brains instantly recognize the error.

What’s more, these missteps annoy us because we can’t turn off the spellchecker in our brains. So when we see a typo, we jump on it. We shout defiantly, “This represents everything that’s wrong in the world!”

We think if we could enforce typographic correctness everywhere then maybe, just maybe, in this messy, disappointing, scary, unpredictable life, something would be perfect, beautiful, and orderly.

2. We do it because it feeds our egos

Not everyone is like us. Some folks can’t remember the rules about apostrophes. Some don’t know what an em-dash is. Heck, some of these people never even diagrammed a sentence in school.

But we have! We know all this stuff! Sure, maybe our six-figure humanities degrees and hours analyzing Joyce and Faulkner go unappreciated in this world of $2 blog posts. But goshdarnit, we know how to use a semicolon. We deserve recognition!

3. We do it because the alternative is difficult and messy

What is a “cretacious widget”? What would our readers call it? Does it need a place on the form? Should it go in its current spot, or somewhere else on the form? Is there anything the form isn’t explaning, that it should?

These are hard questions. They require us to push through the cognitive discomfort of knowing there’s a question that needs asking, but not knowing what it is. They require meticulous research and systematic questioning. They require us to look stupid by asking some engineer what cretacious means. Sometimes, more than one engineer.

And yet, these questions must be dealt with.

Do the right thing, not the easy thing

When we’re really doing our jobs, we’re more than the keepers of commas. We’re the “finders of lost users,” as Clay Delk has said.

We’re communicators.

Yes, typographical correctness has value. But let’s spend less time arguing about the finer points of correct punctuation, typography, spelling, and grammar, and more time advocating for the user. You know, the guy who buys things from us. Or would, if he could find and understand them.

It’s time to step out of the world of black and white answers: italics here, caps there, bold here, single-space there.

It’s time to spend a little less time arguing about how many ellipses can dance on the head of a pin, and more time thinking like the user who is not, in fact, proofreading our writing, but who is actually trying to understand what it’s saying.

Thanks to everyone who came out and said hi. I got lots of very nice comments. Some folks liked what I had to say. Some had points of disagreement… but that’s for another blog post.

The first 30 minutes of audio is available at the SXSW website.

So, here are my current conclusions:

1. Angela’s super legit.

2. I’m convinced by her argument that the original Marketing Sherpa study so often quoted to support the use of “click here” is really not that applicable. It claims that using the verb “click” raises conversion rates about 8%… over the original (odd) phrasing, “continue here.” Obviously, this exact comparison doesn’t tell us that “click here” is preferable to descriptive link text like “register” or “download application.”

3. You really can’t get around the accessibility difficulties with using “click here.” It’s definitely less helpful for people with screen readers.

I’d still love to see more tests on this, but as far as I’m concerned, “click here” is out.

Photo by andreakw on Flickr

Shocked. Appalled. Scandalized. That’s how I felt when I ran across a Copyblogger article asserting that using “click here” to indicate links in copy is actually (gulp) okay.

In the article, “Does Telling Someone to ‘Click Here’ Work?”, Brian Clark calls the offending text an “actionable anchor link,” and cites a Marketing Sherpa study showing higher clickthrough rates for links using the painfully obvious verbiage.

I didn’t know what to think.

I’d been convinced that “click here” was useless drivel for years. After all, venerable web content experts say so:

• Ginny Redish cites accessibility problems with “click here.” (See Guideline 10 in her paper on accessible and usable websites.)
• Brain Traffic’s Elizabeth Saloka mentions “click here” in passing—as the work of the devil—in a couple posts.
• Edited to add: The Yahoo! Style Guide (page 123) and Redish’s Letting Go of the Words (page 318) also advise against using “click here.”
• I just had the below Twitter exchange with respected content strategist Colleen Jones, in which she supported my view.

But I’m a sciency kind of girl, and the pro-”click here” metrics I was seeing were compelling. In addition to the Marketing Sherpa study Brian Clark mentions, I also found that Dustin Curtis had performed a similar test on his blog. The result? “Click here” prompted far more clicks than non-”click here” text.

What to make of these contradictions?

Fortunately, Ben Yoskovitz does a pretty good job of summing up this teapot-tempest for us in his own Copyblogger article. His answer to the question of whether we should use “click here”: it depends.

Yoskovitz identifies sales links as distinct from other types of links (such as “resource” links to useful references for readers, or blog article links designed to get other bloggers’ attention). Sales links, he says, benefit from “click here” verbiage, while the other types don’t.

At first, I was unsure. Sales links are no more action-oriented than other types of links, so why should they get special treatment? From a UX point of view, visitors should be able to find resources they need just as easily as products the site owner wants them to purchase.

At the same time, the point of a marketing website is to motivate user behavior in a way that benefits both the user and the site owner. We want to help people find what they want. Oftentimes, the link I’m hunting for on a site is a sales link, and if “click here” helps me locate it, that’s what the web writer should use.

It would be impractical to use “click here” for every link (a practice Saloka rightly ridicules in her Brain Traffic blog post). Since we would never use “click here” for all the links on a page, maybe—just maybe—even UX-minded web writers should consider using it for some types of links.

It could help us to designate a primary, desired user behavior. As long as we make good guesses (based on user testing, hopefully) about what action the user will want to take next, perhaps using “click here” to signal a primary pathway could help users find their way on our sites. And if the “click here” link isn’t what the user wants, he’ll have all those meaty, descriptive anchor links (like “widgets” or “articles” or “services”) to choose from.

I’m really interested to hear what you think. Do you use “click here,” or does the thought of writing it make you break out in hives?

I also happened to read several books that energized and equipped me to perform these tasks.

Here are the best content-related books I read this year. Some are new, some aren’t. But all of them should be on your bookshelf.

The Yahoo! Style Guide

When I talk about my love of this book, some folks have been known to raise eyebrows. “Yahoo!?,” they ask. “Are they still around? Do they really know about content?”

If you read this book, you’d know that, indeed, they do. Much more than a primer on commas and participles, this book describes how to write vigorous, concise, compelling prose that informs and persuades. It even includes sections on writing for SEO and user interfaces. As a web writer, I found answers to many content questions, and lots of practical ideas, here.

Content Rules, Ann Handley & C.C. Chapman

I’m still working on this one. But it should tell you something that 3 chapters in, I’ve got five or ten good ideas I can implement with my freelance clients. The more I read, the more excited I get about the possibilities of content marketing.

Letting Go of the Words, Ginny Redish

If only I’d read this book when it was published, in 2007, instead of just finding it this past year! My writing would have been better for it: more usable, scannable, informative, and reader-friendly all around. This is an essential for anyone who writes words that folks will read online.

Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug

Can you believe I hadn’t read Krug’s usability masterpiece until 2010? Me neither.

Sure, this book covers web design generally, but (as Tiffani Jones points out) a large chunk of it deals with content and how to make it work for readers. Anyone who works on a website (including writers, designers, developers, and the website owners who hire those folks) should read this book.

The Web Content Strategist’s Bible, Richard Sheffield

So exciting! When I saw this book’s subtitle, The Complete Guide To A New And Lucrative Career For Writers Of All Kinds, I was all, “Sign me up!”

Of course, it’s not just the “lucrative” aspect of content strategy that appeals to me. Mainly, it’s the fact that content strategy can help with so many tasks I, an ostensible “writer,” found myself doing, by default, and despite feeling ill-equipped: planning, editing, taxonomy, metadata, maintenance, and more.

You can do it, Sheffield promises, and this book can help. And it does, by describing the strategy process in detail, and providing several valuable sample deliverables.

Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson

Now considered the mack daddy of content strategy primers, Halvorson’s tome is required reading for any budding content strategist. It offers plenty of food for thought. It forces you to face tough questions like, how much content do you really need? Are you prepared to maintain it? Are your content channels integrated, or “siloed”? Which person (not department or job title) has the final say on what content appears on your company’s website?

Sure, I would’ve liked to have had copious amounts of sample deliverables spoon-fed to me, a la Sheffield (above). But this book provides a thorough, thought-provoking start to thinking about planning your company’s content.

Okay, your turn: what great books did I miss last year? Which ones made your year?

The Momformation banner at BabyCenter.com

I did a double-take. This is the sixth or seventh portmanteau containing “mom” I’ve see lately.

I know you’ve seen “mompreneur,” a blend of “mom” and “entrepreneur.” It refers to those newfangled mothers you hear about, who earn incomes and sometimes wear shoes with laces.

On Twitter, I follow this lady, who goes by “momfluential.” That’s cool.

Then I happened across these other maternal monikers:

• momversation
• momovation
• momopedia

Then, finally, “momformation.”

I guess it makes sense. Mom blogs are big business. We’re all over social networks, too, foisting photos of our offspring on our high-school classmates and business associates. When you think about it, moms make the Internet. Moms, diet pills, and cats that can’t spell.

But it makes me wonder, what’s next? Am I going to be asked to “momment” on a blog? Am I going to find myself in a “momiverse” of “momungous” proportions?

So, is it just me? Or are there “mom” portmanteaus everywhere?

And where are the “Dad” blends? They can’t be far behind.

Contrary to my expectations, I didn’t burst into flames or get booed. People were nice even!

The Interactive Strategies conference, put on by the Houston Interactive Marketing Association, brought marketing and webby types together to talk about cool, non-douchey ways to promote businesses online.

I talked about SEO copywriting:

A month later, I gave a talk on Technical Documentation (aimed at non-writers) at the cPanel Conference. Because they are cool, they let me republish the talk on SlideShare. Here’s the embed:

Take a look through and let me know what you think!

Recently I started trying to get a handle on my company’s content. Not just the content that my department and I create—all the company’s content.

I started a “mind map.” I called it the content ecosystem.

Later, I saw a webinar by Kristina Halvorson. Can you guess what she said? She said it was important to map out a company’s “content ecosystem.” Validation!

So, why is it important?

It’s a place to start. Understanding the ecosystem gives you an idea what you’re dealing with. When I look at mine, I think of all the content creators and approvers in our company. These are the folks who I need to collaborate with to strategically create and care for our content.

Because I think it may help other in-house content strategists, here’s the content ecosystem for my employer, a software company. Please forgive my lack of graphic design skills. (And big props to my friend Shanna Cote for her help. She did what she could, folks.)

The content ecosystem for a software company (click to enlarge).

(Notice that I included the software interfaces themselves as content. They may, in fact, be the most important pieces of content we produce. I wonder whether most software companies normally think of UIs that way?)

So, what’s next? How does this help?

I have my own ideas, which I’ll post later. But if you have some, please share!