Are Web Publishers Obsolete?

As it is the Friday before March break and with yet another winter onslaught hitting Toronto, my office was deserted today. Naturally, as one of the few souls remaining, I passed some time chatting with co-workers.

My cubicle-mate, mentioned that he had perfected a Dreamweaver template that now made it incredibly easy for almost anyone to publish online. I have only dabbled with Dreamweaver templates, but I do love how they have editable and uneditable regions, so that those using templates can't accidentally bring down an entire site by changing one simple line of code. I also like, as I saw from my colleague's template, how Dreamweaver can make it easy to add or subtract designated editable regions.

Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG features already made most web formatting quite easy and combined with a good template, web publishing can indeed be very easy now.

This led me to question whether or not there is a role in large to medium sized organizations for dedicated web publishers?

I define a web publisher as a specialist who takes pre-authored content, formats and adjusts it for the medium, and posts it online. Can content authors using Dreamweaver templates now post directly to the web without the need for a web publisher's intervention? Or can web publisher's now act merely as tester/reviewer?

I do think training content creators to use Dreamweaver’s publishing tools would be easily achievable, that is assuming they have the desire and time to do so.

I don’t believe that online formatting is the stumbling block for online publishing. From my experience, the problem still is writing material that is appropriate for online media. While it seems like every journalist and corporate communicator has now taken a course on web-friendly writing, I still find that many people don’t really get it, or their print bias is too-deeply ingrained, or they just don’t have the time or inclination to really understand online publishing. Making website text effective and appropriate is not just doing the maxims sold as simple solutions, that is write shorter, chunk up you copy, use bullets, don't go more than one screen.

While some of these points are true, there are times when doing the opposite is better. And there are other ways that web publishers can help format, organize, and rewrite copy if necessary, to make it more effective and medium appropriate. These take time to learn and it is here that I think web publishers will continue to offer value to organizations.

So to answer my own question, I’d say that updates to existing online material or simple changes can be done with minimal, possibly no involvement from a web publisher. But new material or substantial changes, call in your pro.

Blah Blah Text - Mea Culpa

I was reading of Jakob Nielsen's most recent Alertbox article, Blah-Blah Text: Keep, Cut, or Kill?, and within seconds I knew I was in trouble.

When I read the last few words of his opening, I had the uneasy feeling that I had broken a basic web usability principle. Nielsen stated:

The introductory paragraph(s) found at the top of many Web pages is what I call blah-blah text: a block of words that users typically skip when they arrive at a page. Instead, their eyes go directly to more actionable content, such as product features, bulleted lists, or hypertext links. The worst kind of blah-blah has no function; it's pure filler — platitudes, such as "Welcome to our site, we hope you will find our new and improved design helpful."

I didn't even finish reading the article before checking my homepage. Sure enough, I had a dreadful blah blah text intro. It should have been obvious to me it was bad copy - anything that starts with "Welcome" is a dead give-away - but it took Nielsen's words to snap me out of it.

My excuse for writing blah blah text is that I wrote it on the night of the website relaunch and I been working days and nights and I was genuinely excited and wanted our visitors to be excited by our redesigned website.

No excuse. I quickly rewrote the copy and purged it from 103 words to 65, without sacrificing any meat, only filler. And - this is my redemption - I was able to chop the words down by almost half and yet add another teaser about a new topic!!!

Still I was feeling guilty and ashamed. I felt as atonement I would to do a "Mea Culpa" blog posting here.

Then I went back to reading the remainder of Nielsen's article, when my shame was assuaged by Nielsen's assertion of his own "Mea Culpa". I did feel a bit better that even the divine Nielsen has his moments of weakness.