Overview: Content creation & management

Writing tips from "Writing for the European Commission web presence"

“Daily political events consistently evoked negative emotions [which] predicted worse day-to-day psychological and physical health, but also greater motivation to take action aimed at changing the political system that evoked the negative emotions in the first place.”

Law 1 / Reduce - The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.Law 2 / Organize - Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.Law 3 / Time - Savings in time feel like simplicity.Law 4 / Learn - Knowledge makes everything simpler.Law 5 / Differences - Simplicity and complexity need each other.Law 6 / Context - What lie…

Gerry McGovern on skills needed for digital communication people. For example: - choose the right word to drive action; - make it easy finding content allowing users to complete a task quickly; - design for maintenance and evolution; - love metadata, be an information architect. I wished I had all of those.

People do not read online: "fundamental scanning behaviors remain constant, even as designs change."

"The Huffington Post is the third most popular online news site, after only Yahoo! News and Google News. They must be doing something right!"

"Plain Language For Everyone, Even Experts" (video)

"Design for each channel’s unique strengths and role in the customer journey to create usable context-specific experiences."

Chunking is a concept where text and multimedia content is broken up into smaller chunks to help users process, understand, and remember it better.

One self-experiment we all should try once: To understand this website based on its images.

Cheap storage. Cheap processing power. Cheap energy. It’s all great. We don’t have to think. We just dump our content onto the website and let search engines figure it out.

Good evidence why coming up with ever new, more "beautiful", "attractive" and trendy designs that "pop" is not always a good thing.

4 Steps to communicate anything clearly, according to a scientist who teaches quantum physics to kids

Choice seems appealing. But choice overload means we need longer to make decisions. Too long and people will abandon the task and look elsewhere.

Choose ‘fluent’ words - short, simple, easy-to-pronounce terms

Online writing - use more lists, use them bullets, use this template. "People love listicles. Lists get attention, reach skimmers and scanners, get remembered and shared."