Web Content is Really Hard to Write

"80% of your time will be spent writing good content." I must have repeated this phrase 100 times this year in various presentations and website project meetings. Logically, I know its a solid statement, but it's always good to be reminded by just doing it.

It's now taken me weeks longer than expected to write stuff for our new FivePaths company website under development. Sometimes I just want to say on one page, "We build websites, databases, and know a lot of important technology stuff. Maybe we can help you." Its hard to look inside yourself, and the team and projects you know so well, and generate compelling ways to describe it.

So naturally, I have procrastinated. Many times now. And sometimes while procrastinating, I looked for magical software tools to help me... somehow... Surprisingly to me, there are some:

Storyist (storyist.com)

We often recommend storytelling as a compelling frame for writing content for the web. Storyist is a terrific Mac software designed to help novelists generate and organize their story. Of course I bought it immediately, and lost at least 30 minutes exploring the metaphor of the story for our website. I could generate "characters" (ie clients, partners, etc), "plot" (our services), organize images, and walk through all of these as "chapters", organizing and reorganizing what comes first and next. I have tried organizing my thoughts in similar ways using a wiki, but found the story frame much more useful.

WebSort (websort.net)

Here we have a software combining index cards with surveying. I could set up a free account online and start generating cards containing categories and subcategories, and mix them around in different ways. Very compelling, especially when you are as overwhelmed as I was with all the great ways to organize website concepts. Its like magnetic poetry for building taxonomies. Particularly cool and essential for real card sorting activities, you can invite folks to sort your cards the way it works best for them, and then analyze the results.

WriteRoom (hogbaysoftware.com)

Distractions really help fuel procrastination. When writing web content, there is nothing more distracting than the other five screens I have open on my computer (my email, Facebook, calendar, etc). Sometimes I need help focusing on just one thing at a time. WriteRoom basically brings your Mac back to the days when portable computers meant two people and a large cardboard box. It gives you a nice black screen to type bright green letters. Everything else is gone from sight. This is as far as I got, although I understand you can change the colors of the background and font to a less headache inducing combination.

WhiteSmoke (whitesmoke.com/mac/)

Ok I actually never tried this one, but it seemed really compelling as I was copy editing the About section for our new site, for the third time. They promise grammar, spelling and style checking, as well as a dictionary/thesaurus feature. They have software to fit various writing "profiles", including business and hi-tech writing. I wonder if it is like online translations, which still struggles to tell the difference between someone from Berlin and a jelly doughnut. Ich bin kein Berliner.