Facttactic

Corporate and technical writers

Web Content

the need for website speed

Next month, Google releases a major update to its search tool by ranking website speed. Yawn, I hear you say! But, no, hang on, take note of this one.

The update will — put simply — make the speed at which your website’s pages load a significant factor in how well your site ranks in Google search.

Page load speed has always been a very important factor in visitor website satisfaction. All the reputable stats show that if people wait for too long for a page to load, many will leave a site before the page displays. Slow sites lose sales.

Now, Google is to make speed even more important, and all website owners should be aware of what that means for them.

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benefits of online user guides

If you’re writing a user guide or policy manual, or similar, and its target readership (staff or customers) is spread over different locations, I often recommend moving away from a printed document (such as Word/PDF).

Instead, I steer clients towards creating online (HTML or XML) documents.

That sounds like it’s introducing new complexities but, really, the learning curve is not steep, and the benefits strongly outweigh what is largely, and simply, concern of the unknown.

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new resource for Māori writers

I was privileged to build an online magazine called Mata Media (http://matamedia.co.nz/) last week for Aotearoa Media Collective.

Mata Media has been set up as an online platform to publish Māori journalism and opinions from Māori perspectives, targeting specifically writing that may not find a home anywhere else.

It’s a great concept (and not a bad-looking site!!), and I’ll look forward to reading the work on it as it grows over time.

not enough small businesses online!

It’s estimated that only around half of NZ’s small businesses have a website.

In today’s online-dominated business world, that’s far too few — businesses not online are missing out on many opportunities.

A website is a 24/7 advertisement / shopfront to the world. They’re inexpensive to run and, for a basic small business site, inexpensive to build. 

Rushed as small business owners are just operating their businesses day-to-day, putting up a website or some sort of online presence should be a priority.

So: it was pleasing to see two more small Kiwi businesses getting their shopfronts online this month:

And good to see Mighty Atom Marketing helping them get there.

wamp up your website

If you use WordPress, you’ll know how incredibly easy it is as a web beginner to update your site live — i.e, make changes to it while it is online and visible to everyone.

But if you want to make a WordPress site from scratch, it’s better to do that offline so you can play around with its look and content before releasing it to the world.

There is an easy way to do that too. It involves setting up software, called Wamp, that makes WordPress run on your own computer as if online.

All the Wamp instructions I find online seem to complicate the process. After struggling with other people’s tech-heavy instructions, I finally took some time to put them into plain language.

Here are they are (… give them a go, it will make website development for beginners so much more powerful; and do get in touch if you have any problems following them)

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