If you’ve read The Man Who Walked through Time by Colin Fletcher, the first man ever to have traversed the Grand Canyon on foot, you may also have browsed the 15 books that his fans also purchased on Amazon. If you were planning your own trek, perhaps you tracked down other books with references to Fossil Canyon. The Web is a wonderful place to expand your understanding of the world.

So what if it isn’t a good place to hunker down and read? That’s what books are for. The Web is for getting things done. At Magnificent Publications, we keep this in mind at all times as we repurpose content for the Web.

We take print materials and make them into Web content that

• Says the right thing
• Appeals to readers’ immediate interests
• Is easy to scan
• Gives visitors a road map to their chosen destination (and yours)

The Why and How of Repurposing

Usability expert Jakob Nielson gives this example of a New York Times headline to explain how writing for the Web is different from writing for print:

In print, [a headline like "Coping With the Tall Traveler's Curse"] is a bit enticing and might draw readers in. Because the article featured a photo of a tall guy crunched in the back of a taxi, the article’s content was clear to anybody glancing at that page in the newspaper.

In contrast, putting the same headline online would fail several guidelines for writing for the Web:

• The first 3 words have no information-carrying content. On the Web, you must start with words like “tall traveler” because users often scan down the left part of a list of items. …
• The headline lacks keywords — such as “airline seat” and “hotel bed” — that are important for search engine optimization (SEO). …
• The words “tall traveler’s curse” are insufficiently specific to tell users what the story is about. Because headlines are often presented as plain links removed from the article itself, the photo of the poor guy in the cab won’t be there to explain the story’s content.

We write Web content that is brief, to the point, and search engine friendly. We also optimize non-text materials for search engines, e.g., photos, audio, and video.

How? Using modular content development. Print documents are best written using the familiar organizing principles of the sentence, the paragraph, and the chapter. But functional websites are based on modular content. The text comes in small, well-organized units that can be reused or replaced. With modular content your website can change a little at a time. You won’t need to rewrite entire pages, only drop in new modules.

For a discussion of modular content development, see our blog, The Editorial Advantage. Please call for a free one-hour consultation and estimate.