Meaning and interpretation. When you get down to the essence of language – and in turn, communication – it all comes down to these two qualities: the literal meaning …and figurative interpretation of words. The stumbling block online isn’t so much in the dictionary definition of the vocabulary used to describe products or services, but [...]

It seems everyone in the web community these days is trying to “define” the various discipline areas that make up web development as a whole. It’s funny that human nature forces us to erect parameters upon which to hang meaning. Perhaps it is how we conquer new frontiers, by staking claim of what is known, before we explore the infinite possibilities of what is not…

Most people think of web content in terms of blocks of text that fill the pages of a website. Sure, the tone and style may be different …or the layout might force the blocks of text into smaller, more readable chunks, but if you were to ask most people to point to the content on their website, they would primarily refer to the physical words alone (or video, as the case may be)…

I am not a bandwagon kind of person, but I am a solutions person. When I started Digitalword in 2004, nobody was talking about the written content on web pages. It was out of frustration at seeing web projects take twice as long to complete and yielding half the results they should, that I started [...]

In a recent client meeting, I had to quickly think of a way to describe the web content process. The client wanted web copy and thought that in hiring a professional web content writer, that’s what she would get – copy to “fill in the blanks”. That’s when I resorted to using something a good writer should never use – a cliché…

Square peg, round hole. I use this expression a lot when it comes to explaining to clients what it’s like to rewrite the web content for their existing website without making any other changes to the website itself – like tweaks to the navigation structure or design…

Since most small to mid-sized businesses don’t have an in-house editorial team …or marketing department …or even web team, web content review often falls on an already stretched business owner to provide constructive feedback on the first draft of content received from their web copywriter…

Before the dot com boom, my first career was in marketing …sales to be exact. I was the marketing manager for an insurance product line at the branch office of a Fortune 500 company. In the few years that I was there, sales and profitability increased by nearly 200% under my direction…

2009 was a challenging year economically. While many businesses suffered the results of a downturn in sales, few sought to fight back with increased expenditure on the very tactics that could help propel them through the tough times. Ironically, marketing and communications budgets are often the first to get cut when companies actually need them [...]

I love television commercials. Where others might search for the remote in earnest to mute, fast forward or channel surf – I prefer to sit through these three minute breaks as sound bites of entertainment in and of themselves…