Five Steps to Online Publishing Perfection

If you are using blogging software as part of your web site communication plan - great idea! Blog applications are an easy way to provide timely updates and information to your readers. But beware that ease-of-use does not lead to blog blunders. Here's a checklist to run down before you click "publish":

• Spell check. Easily overlooked, spell checking is also really easy. Firefox has spell checking built in and many WYSIWYG tools also provide spell checking. Be careful; spell checking can't help all the copy on your web sight.
• Use at least one image. Photos help illustrate a point, or at least make a page more interesting. No idea what photos to use or out of resources? Look to Flickr or Stock Xchange for images licensed through the Creative Commons.
• Use internal links. Point the reader to more content on your site. Good for your site, good for search engines, good for the earth.
• Right-size your photos. Posting images to blog content - good. Posting images that can be reprinted as billboards - no so much. General rule of thumb is to make sure your uploaded images are around 640x480 px at 72 dpi. Any larger and you'll be spinning the clock as people wait to download the files. If you need a handy photo resize tool, check this one out on DLINC's site. You can upload your JPG files and it will spit resized images back at you - one good for blog posting and one good for thumbnails. Give it a try. Save some bandwidth.
• View your published post. Clicking "publish" is the second to last step - go back and actually read the page you just published. Doing so will help you spot weird text breaks, funny spacing, character freak-outs common with WYSIWYG tools, and spelling issues. Don't let your readers be the first to view your words online.

The great online publishers of the world use many other mental checkpoints to grab a reader's interest, as well as appear sticky-sweet to search engines. But perfecting these five will put you on the right path to publishing perfection.

11.29.2010. 10:00