October 16, 2000 New Thinking:
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October 16, 2000
Editorial issues
By Gerry McGovern
Does your website have a style and tone? Does it have a publication schedule? How do you deal with content copyright and legal issues? What sort of privacy policy do you have? What policy do you have in place with regard to responding to your readers’ queries?
A great many websites fail to deal with key editorial issues. This leads to a poor experience for the reader, resulting in the reader taking a poor view of the organization that created the website.
Style and Tone
Style deals with such things as grammar and spelling conventions. Should the content be in American English or European English? Do you spell it “e-mail” or “email”. All simple enough stuff, but added together it can make a big difference. Tone deals with how the content is written. Is it dry, witty, first-person, third-person, etc.
It is essential to achieve consistency relating to content. When the technical department writes about ecommerce is it writing about the same concept as the marketing department writes about?
Publication Schedule
How often should the homepage be published/changed? How often will email newsletters be published? You need to balance the expectation of the reader with regard to how often they would like to see content changed, with the cost of doing so.
The more frequent the publication schedule, the more expensive the process. Once a publication schedule has been established it must be rigidly adhered to. If the homepage is to be ‘published’ at 10am every weekday, then it must be published at 10am on-the-dot every weekday
Copyright & Legal
Every website requires a copyright statement covering the conditions under which the content may be used in other media. Legal issues relating to content need to be defined. If, for example, the website is promoting alcohol, what are the legal implications? Remember, a website reaches into potentially every jurisdiction in the world, so what’s legal in one country may not be legal in another.
Reader Privacy
Study after study is showing that people are very concerned about their privacy online. A National Consumer League study, published in October 2000, found that US consumers are more concerned about losing their personal privacy than they are about key public policy issues such as health care, crime and taxes.
Not having a proper privacy policy will lose you readers and customers. People are much less likely to subscribe to your newsletters or give any personal information if they do not know what exactly will be done with the information they give. Never collect information on your reader in a surreptitious manner. Always be upfront with your reader.
Reader Contact
All good websites invite interaction from the reader. A clear approach needs to be developed in relation to:
- The type of interaction that is to be facilitated. Sales and support queries are a must. However, will the reader be encouraged to interact with authors with regard to what they are writing?
- How reader interaction is channelled. Where do sales queries go to? Support queries?
- The response schedule for interaction. If a sales query is received, how quickly will the reader get a response. 24 hours? 12 hours? 1 hour?
- How does the organization measure the quality of response that the reader is receiving?
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