How we’ve used an editing process to improve web content
When you edit the text on a website, it’s helpful to follow a series of steps.
We used a process called Editing that works
This year we worked with Caroline Jarrett and Jane Matthews to develop our content design training. As part of this project, we learned how to use Editing that works, Caroline and Jane’s nine-step process for improving website copy.
The nine steps are:
- Decide on who and why
- Get to know the content
- Put the best bit first
- Slash everything else
- Edit sentences
- Put “if” before “then”
- Demolish walls of words
- Launch and land on the same name
- Rest it then test it
We’ve now used elements of this process in various contexts:
- helping publishers to apply writing for the web best practice in our content design training sessions
- pair writing with publishers during our consultancy work
- developing our own written work in the UX team, such as guidance documents, training material and blog posts.
Having an editing process is useful
Following a process like this is useful for a number of reasons.
It adds structure to a collaborative editing session
When a group of us are working on a page together, we’ve found it helpful to take a structured approach.
The structure is a bit like a set of rules in a game. The rules help us all know what to focus on, what to do, and what’s happening next. They act as a neutral third party, keeping us all on track.
It makes sure we don’t miss anything
The process acts as a kind of checklist, ensuring that we do everything we need to do. This helps us to do a more complete job of editing a text.
It helps us to edit things in a logical order
In an editing session, it’s tempting to dive into a text and start rewriting sentences as you read them. The time disappears, and before you know it, you’ve spent thirty minutes crafting and recrafting a paragraph until the meaning shines through.
Then you look at the page as a whole, and decide to cut the beautifully crafted paragraph.
Select text, tap delete. Goodbye, beautiful paragraph.
Following a process helps you to avoid wasting time in this way. You work out what needs to be on the page first. Then you spend time rewriting the sentences.
It’s been fun experimenting with writing headings as headlines
Step two of the process is to write headings as headlines. Headlines are mini-sentences that make sense on their own. I’ve used them in this blog post if you want to see some examples.
Writing headings in this way has been hard to get used to, but it’s been a useful skill to develop.
We normally write headings as short noun phrases
It’s common practice on the web to write headings as short noun phrases. For example, here are some short noun phrase headings from the Wikipedia page for the City of Edinburgh Council:
- History
- Political control
- Elections
- Council area
- Places of interest
Wikipedia: City of Edinburgh Council
Headlines are different
Headlines contain a bit more information than these short noun phrases. The idea is described by Russell Davies in his book “Everything I Know About Life I Learned From PowerPoint”
There’s a bad PowerPoint habit you should try to abandon – writing headings.
People do it because the headings reflect how they’re thinking about their presentation: ‘I’m going to do a section on this, a section on that, and a section on the other.’ And they write the section headings at the top of the slide and list all the information below it.
If you look at those Wikipedia examples above, you can imagine a PowerPoint presentation with slide titles like that.
Russell goes on:
But that’s not how people read. That’s not how media works. That’s not, for instance, how newspapers are written. The front page of a newspaper does not have a large heading that says ‘Crime Update’. It has a headline that says ‘Killer Strikes Again’.
This is a bit of an aside, but the PowerPoint book was one of my favourite reads of 2024.
Everything I Know About Life I Learned From PowerPoint
Adding headlines helps you get to know the text
As a step in the editing process, writing a headline for each bit of the text is useful because it helps you to get acquainted with the page as it currently is. Crucially, it forces you to engage with tangled sentences that you might otherwise skim past.
Adding a headline to each chunk of text also highlights:
- information that need to be chunked differently
- duplicated information
- information that is in the wrong place.
Sometimes headlines work better than short noun phrase headings
Adding headlines to a text is primarily a exercise for getting to know a text. But sometimes, we find that we like the headline headings that we’ve added, and we keep them in.
You can often skim read a page with headlines more easily, because the mini sentences make sense on their own.
Here’s a blog post that uses headings written as headlines. See how easy it is to grasp the argument of the page without having to read the whole thing too carefully:
Don’t be afraid of the Big Long Page
I’ve also noticed headline-style headings crop up elsewhere on the web.
Here’s a seasonal example from an NHS page on the common cold:
Editing website copy is worth the effort
It can be hard to make the time to edit the text content on a site, but we’ve routinely found that it has a positive impact.
Pages have a tendency to grow, and as bits get added, the content can get disorganised. Getting together with colleagues and tidying them up is well worth the effort, and we’ve found that following a process like this is an effective way to do this sort of work.