Listening to your documents

— Published December 1st, 2002  |  by David Moore

So you're the person responsible for the strategy and creation of your site's content, and you're facing an ever-increasing number and variety of documents.

Some documents are simple text to be read, some code to be compiled and run, some graphics files, some Flash movies, and some are chains of commands from HTML pages through n-tier architecture to databases and back again.

Even just looking at text-based documents, a moderate sized site might offer press releases, white papers, case studies, product specifications, booking and order forms, discussion boards, FAQs, security and privacy policies, and any amount of headlines, subheads, summaries and microcontent.

And the technology supporting all these feels like a fire sale in an acronym shop - you're juggling flat HTML, ASP, PDFs, PHP, some old .cgi scripts, XML templates, SQL queries, all on a CMS-driven site that's fine in IE on XP, but goes awry in OS X (or would if you bothered to check).

You need more writers, a designer who can spell and 25 hours in the day. But what you really need is a bit of perspective.

What are documents, when you strip away all the baggage and the terminology? David Levy, in 'Scrolling Forwards,' his excellent book on the past and future of documents, argues that a document is 'a talking thing' - an inanimate object that we fashion to talk for us.

Documents record what we would like to say, no more or less. They then can be made to repeat those words an indefinite number of times perfectly, without their creator having to be woken from her bed because someone in Australia visits her company's site.

This might sound obvious, but in this amazing transmission of human characteristics to objects (and now in digital form to things that are hardly there at all), we often forget that all documents are really doing are talking for us.

So when we're planning and writing them, we should be asking just the same questions we would if we were preparing to talk on the same subject:

• Who am I talking to?
• What are they looking for?
• What am I trying to say to them?
• What's the best way to do that?

These basic questions of communication - audience, aims, objectives, format and the like - so often get forgotten when preparing content for a site.

Books aren't well structured, well written and free of spelling errors because they are bound and clapped between covers. The book is the technology, but behind it is a complex and professional system of commissioning, planning, writing and editing that ensures quality.

On the Internet, there's a sense that our newer technology will somehow guarantee that the message gets through without these steps. I wouldn't say so.