Facttactic

Corporate and technical writers

Facttactic’s Blog

innovative online training for Māori journalists

Congrats to Aotearoa Media Collective for the release of their second online training resource for Māori journalists.

AMC last week released the Taumatua Programme, a series of four e-learning modules that explore the importance of building and strengthening relationships between the media and Māori.

The programme follows on from AMC’s Kōmiromiro Programme, a series of seven e-learning modules designed to strengthen Māori journalism, that was released last year.

Kōmiromiro includes training on interviewing techniques, court reporting, local government reporting, feature and opinion writing and much more, and has contributions from some of New Zealand’s most prominent Māori journalists.

You can find both programmes here: https://matamedia.co.nz/maori-journalism-training-resources/

Facttactic is proud to have played a small role in getting both ground-breaking programmes online and looks forward to working further with Aotearoa Media Collective to help further strengthen Māori journalism in Aotearoa.

how to easily move a WordPress website to a new web host

If you need to move your WordPress website to a new web host, there are plenty of plugins you can load into your site that will do the job for you. But my experience, having tried a number of them, is of repeated time-outs, failed transfers, and restrictive data limits.

Last week, I took the plunge and gave it a go manually. It worked a treat.

[Read more…] about how to easily move a WordPress website to a new web host

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.

[Read more…] about the need for website speed

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.

[Read more…] about benefits of online user guides

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.