The Online Style Guide

Many magazines and newspapers have styleguides. Typically they are written and enforced by the production editor and they are an incredibly useful way of ensuring a consistency of tone and execution in a brand's editorial output.

They can also cause severe problems when applied to online content. There are several reasons why:

• Your readers are global not just UK-based
• Your readers may not necessarily know your brand and its idiom (they could have reached your site by referral or search result, for instance)
• Things change much more quickly online than they do offline

Now all this doesn't make a styleguide obsolete - far from it. But moving one into the online arena should be accompanied by a far-reaching review of its recommendations - particularly by testing them against the many online indicators of reader behaviour.

You say notebook, they say laptop
For instance, one clear example of how an offline styleguide may be out of step with onlineterminology is the usage of laptop v notebook.

Several Dennis magazine styleguides have traditionally backed notebook over laptop, and they would expect the website to reflect that preference.

However as online journalists we have access to qualititative tools that show what our readers actually use when they search for content. These include:

• search logs from Dennis site searches
• Yahoo's keyword selector tool
• Google Trends

Our Widearea search logs have consistently shown that our readers enter 'laptop' ahead of 'notebook' by a factor of more than 3 to 1.

Yahoo's keyword tracker - which tracks the usage of search terms across Yahoo's search engine - showed that in one month 2.6m people searched for 'laptop' or 'laptop pc' compared with 750,000 who typed in 'notebook'.

Multiply the figure by 10 to get get arough idea how many people performed the same searches on Google.

All these tools say the same thing: use laptop rather than notebook and you could double or even treble your online audience. They also suggest that perhaps the print magazine should take heed of their readers' quantifiable online behaviour and adapt accordingly.

Posted by Mat Toor at 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the first post in this blog. I made the decision to set up this site on a Friday morning while suffering from the intense pain that only 4 broken ribs can administer. So I'm in a bit of a crotchety mood.

I've been a journalist for 18 years. Before that I studied English literature and linguistics at Cambridge university. I've been writing in one form or another for the best part of, Christ, 35 years.

I get annoyed at bad grammar and bad spelling. With the 'Globalization' of our culture and language I'm annoyed much of the time. I hate the fact that to write valid HTML I have to correct 'colour' to 'color'.

I also hate the fact that both the New York Times and Apple Computer (institutions I admire in so many other ways) display gross fuckwititude in their slavish devotion to the grocer's apostrophe.

I've worked for some notable magazines, newspapers and websites since 1989, among them:

• The Financial Times
• The Guardian
• The Evening Standard
• Campaign
• Marketing
• Q magazine and website
• Computer Trade Weekly
• What Hi-Fi?
• Escape magazine
• CD-ROM magazine
• Edge
• Orange website
• And a plethora of various Emap and Dennis websites in my stints as editorial director of the online arms of both publishers (Maxim, Auto Express, Mojo, Mixmag, IT PRO, MacUser, Evo, PC PRO, Smash Hits! etc etc etc)

In other words, I have earned and established my credentials to write a prescriptive style guide of the old school.

In fact I wrote one myself, when I was managing editor of Freeserve (which has since mutated into Orange by way of a brief cocoon as Wanadoo). You can view it yourself here.

Reading it now, it seems both quaint and foolish. That nigh-on Biblical certainty of tone (or even certainty of Tome) has no place in an online world where the silicon is shifting as we type.

We write in a world where Google and Yahoo are the gatekeepers to success as opposed to brand values and editorial heritage. Where changing a headline from the on-brand and succinct "PhwoarI" to the prosaic "Oily Girls Wrestling Naked" can bring in 100,000 new readers a month.

To achieve success in the online world you have to unlearn many of the writing skills you acquired in offline media. You have to view repetition and lowest common denominators as friends rather than enemies. Because the best written article in history is worthless if no one reads it.

Let me repeat that because it bears repeating (and could improve the quote's indexibility).

The best written article in history is worthless if no one reads it.

So this online style guide won't make you a good writer. But it may help you realise and then discard those elements of being a 'good writer' that stop you being a well read writer online.

Posted by Mat Toor at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)