Note: This page is out of date and is unlikely to be updated soon.
This page was originally compiled for a presentation on editing websites given at the Australian Society for Technical Communication (ASTC) annual conference in Sydney, NSW, Australia on 30 October 1998. Most of the items on the original list are long gone from the Web.
See also my pages on technical writing and editing books, especially the page on Web pages and Web sites.
Style Guides and Writing Guides
Sun Microsystem’s Read Me First! Style Guide (Not specifically web-related; an excellent overall style guide, unfortunately no longer available online.)
To order from Amazon, click here.
Web Style Guide
http://webstyleguide.com/wsg3/index.html. Also available in book form as “Web style guide: Basic design principles for creating Web sites”, by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton, Yale University Press, 1999. Review. To order from Amazon, click here.
Writing for the Web, https://www.nngroup.com/topic/writing-web/
Editing a Website: Extending the Levels of Edit
http://www.theprices.com/4artTW1.htm
Describes lessons learned by a university editing class when they attempted to edit a website created by others. Far from being a simple text-editing project, it turned into a major overhaul of the site, dealing with screen design, coding, interface issues and interactivity. The Levels of Edit concept provided a framework for the work.
Accessibility
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (W3C Recommendation 5-May-1999)
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/
A detailed discussion of guidelines that page authors should follow in order to make their pages more accessible for people with disabilities as well as more useful to other users, new page viewing technologies (mobile and voice) and electronic agents such as indexing robots.
Meta Tags, Keywords, Search Engines and More
Search Engines Features Chart
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/features.html
A comparison chart of the major search engines and the factors that affect if and when a page is indexed. Includes a clear beginners’ explanation of each factor, including a discussion of meta tags and keywords.
Miscellaneous
Editing Web Sites presentation
Last updated 20 October 2016