CopyCleaners Essay 1

Newspapers and magazines have style guides that writers and editors use to maintain a consistent writing style. I suggest you choose a guide, and use it. Your site will benefit. Here are a few guides - they have varying target audiences, so look at several and choose which suits your material:

• The Canadian Press Stylebook
• The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual
• The Economist Style Guide
• Wired Style
• Chicago Manual of Style

It's also well worth the effort to create a design guide for your site. This ensures that your site has a consistent look and feel. A design guide defines things such as:

• basic layout
• overall colors
• fonts and font sizes
• graphics palettes
• image sizes

Make sure you document your site. Individual pages should have plenty of comment tags showing which code sections do what, and where content should go. A site user guide should detail what content can be changed or updated, and how to do so.

This may seem like a lot of work, but thinking through such issues will pay off in the long run and save hours of aggravation.