website

I’m being paid—well, my one-man business is—to write the text for a website. It’s not the first website I’ve written, won’t be the last. Web-writing is different. I don’t know what principles apply; I make them up based on looking at a lot of websites.

In 2004 I’m about to resign from my community development job when my employer offers me a new role—writing the content for their new website, becoming their publications officer. I accept, poking myself in the financial eye, turning down a job as student welfare co-ordinator at a secondary college in the Yarra Valley.

I write an enormous amount of content for that website, end up a webmaster by default. It’s a wonder how we fall into jobs. I still laugh to think of me as a webmaster. Right now I can’t restore the lost interweb connection on my home PC.

Soon after I redevelop their intranet, devise the structure and the layout before the designer turns it into a functioning entity. Since I left it’s had another incarnation and staff tell me how boring it is now, a backhanded compliment, I think.

Now, late at night, here I am hunched over the keyboard, several versions of the same base copy hovering in and out of screen, crafting the right words for the SKIPS website. I detonate the dot points, go for short pithy sentences instead. Every sentence is a paragraph. Every paragraph makes a statement. As always, every unnecessary word gets the chop.

I run out of energy for the last few paragraphs, FAQ material hooked from other sources than the original SKIPS material. I’ll revisit that text in the morning, flush out the jargon, reshape the structure. I’ll talk with Miss Liz the SKIPS co-ordinator on the blower, scroll through the text, tweak a few things that need her clarification.

Job done.

Rock on.