Why I’ve started writing weeknotes
It’s Giles Turnbull’s fault. I’ve been meaning to start writing more blog posts for the last five years or so, and never seem to get around to it. Then I read this new website, Doing Weeknotes, and it made me think that this might be a way in. I don’t know how long I’ll stick with it, but seems worth giving it a crack.
Lauren Pope is one of my favourite people to read in the world of content, and she writes weeknotes. That seems like a good recommendation.
Some rules
The first rule is I can change the rules if it seems like they need changing.
But aside from that:
- Write every Friday
- Don’t spend more than 30 minutes
- Write about work stuff, mostly
- It doesn’t need to be perfect
On that last point: I’ve found that working in content design requires taking a critical eye to writing. That’s good, but it can get in the way of publishing your own writing. Wanting to write clearly and unambiguously sometimes means that writing a blog post takes a long time when you get to editing it. For these weeknotes, I’m going to write and publish quickly, so it won’t always be as clear as it could be.
What I did this week
I’m planning our next training session
I’m running our fourth session of Content Design for EdWeb 2 next Thursday, 21 March. This is a content design training session for web publisher colleagues who are thinking about their site’s upcoming (or recent) migration to our new content management system, EdWeb 2.
Here’s the blurb:
“This session is delivered by the Website and Communications User Experience team and is aimed at Lead Publishers who have completed the EdWeb 2 training. Building on topics covered in the Effective Digital Content online course, this practical workshop looks at how to apply effective digital content design principles to your EdWeb 2 site.”
We’ve been asking attendees to bring along a piece of content that they want to improve. Then we can talk about content design principles and apply them to the examples from the attendees’ websites.
I was a bit nervous about this at first, but it’s gone really well. The examples are real and reflect the messiness of an actual website. Sometimes the topic of a page is complicated and it’s not easy to put it into Plain English.
It’s been good to see publishers show their sites to colleagues. It means they get an outside view on the language used on their site, and on how the content is broken up and organised.
I listened to a podcast about doing content design training for a large organisation
Kind of blew my mind that there’s a podcast about the exact thing I’m working on at the moment.
Here it is:
Training people at a UN Agency to write for their new intranet
Is that really 30 minutes?
Yep. That went faster than I expected.
See you next week.
