253 - 'W' is for Writing

‘A-Z of WordPress’ with Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley

Hello, It’s another A-Z of WordPress. The series where we attempt to cover all the major aspects of building and maintaining sites with WP. Today is for W for Writing.

Preamble

As we are grouping “XYZ” into one truly anti-climactic episode for the season this is our penultimate episode of the series.

Certainly writing and words are essential to the blogging platform (now CMS / Website builder), in our case WordPress, but we thought we would go wide on this topic and venture into the world of web typography and more generally, writing.

There’s way more under the umbrella of writing than either of us thought, and here’s a summary of the topics which we cover in the podcast…

Web Fonts

• Browser support (and maintenance)
• https://wptavern.com/a-web-font-api-possibly-coming-to-wordpress
• In terms of speed, variable (woff2) fonts from Google are an interesting advance
• So is this https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-size-adjust

Typography

• Choosing fonts
• Typeface / font pairs
• System for spacing

SEO and AI

• Article lengths – isn’t this silly?
• AI – robots writing for robots
• Will the robots make this all moot?
• Massive content creation abilities in GPT-3, Bertha.ai etc.
• Grammarly and Pro Writing Aid

Blogging, Forums, Documentation

• Is the written word alone enough?
• Are newsletters better?
• Has anyone solved the problem with outdated forums?

Does the interface matter?

• Gutenberg
• Google Docs
• Simple note taking app
• Distraction free
• Scrivener / Atticus etc.
• The interface needs to reflect the content type?

Are you in the mood?

• Are you getting paid for this or writing for the love of it?
• Is this for business or pleasure?
• Do you read enough to be effective at writing?

Should an expert be the writer?

• Should we pay a copywriter to do the writing for us, rather than staring at a black page – Todd E. Jones – Copyflight
• Do you understand the ways to make your writing more effective?

Has the world gone all Twitter?

• Do we need to worry about the fact that the younger generation (and the rest of us to be honest) are now unable to apply the attention it takes to consume writing. We need it to be brief, punchy etc.

Mixed content

• What about the fact that in the modern world, content is mixed up? So there’s some text with a picture, a gif, a video, a hyperlink to other things. Have the rules of writing changed?

Do you need to own your own writing?

• Do we now care about owning our own writing or are we just giving up and making content with the least friction for discoverability. In other words Facebook, Twitter et al.
• Should we care that we own the content – WordProof?

Will writing even exist?

• Did you know that the existence of writing comes down to bookkeeping? In ancient Sumer, writing started so that you could keep an inventory of who owed you how many sheep etc. The prosaic stuff came later! Will writing even be needed when we can record all-the-things and they’ll offer the same level of proof. Voice, video, AR all feel like they’re pushing out the attention of the younger generation.
• You don’t need to Google anything with text now, you just say it, and it speaks back to you.

Accessibility

• Do we need think more about screen readers?