Beyond cut and paste: the professional skills every government web publisher should have
Control-A, Control-C, Control-V. Anyone can do that, right?
So we can give our web publishing work to a few junior staff, train them on the software (a nice little development opportunity, bless) and get them to just bung whatever we send them up on the site.
If you work in website management for a large organisation where publishing has been devolved this will sound all too familiar. It’s the digital equivalent of giving everyone some blu-tack and poster paints and letting them stick what they like in the front window of the building – and yet, amazingly, it’s going on to some degree or other in every big place I’ve come across.
So – leaving the dark arts of digital engagement aside for a moment – here are the skills and knowledge I’d ideally want every staff member involved in good old-fashioned web 1.0 content work to have under their belt before they are let loose on the biggest shop window the organisation has. I’d love to know whether you agree.
Specialist skills and knowledge
- Competence in using the web publishing tools. An acceptable, proven and sustained level of ability on the CMS (or equivalent suite of publishing software). Which requires a degree of technical aptitude in the first place, and regular use of the software to keep the skills fresh – in spite of anything CMS vendors may claim about their intuitive GUIs.
- Writing and editing for web skills. So important and yet so underrated. Everything that goes on a website should be passed through the hands of someone who knows how to edit it appropriately or can advise on doing so. Not rocket science by any means and there’s no shortage of short, cheap and worthwhile courses in how to do it.
- Proofreading skills. A separate skill from writing is quality checking, by someone with a sharp eye for detail and a deep knowledge of all the quality standards and common mistakes that apply to the web. But seldom is the same amount of importance placed on this for websites as it is for print.
- Information architecture skills. I’d want them to be able to talk about such things as card sorting exercises, taxonomies and the importance of short, action-oriented page titles. I’d expect them to be able to explain convincingly to their colleagues why not everything on the website can appear on its homepage. I’d expect them to have read up on these principles and practicalities, given the wide availability of stuff online and on the bookshelves. Or even done a course.
- Practical accessibility skills. They need to have read and understood the WCAG at least in summary form, and not only know why writing “click here“or uploading a scanned image of a text document is a bad idea but be able to tell others too. Some understanding of how to validate their own pages would also be useful.
- Usability and user experience …er, experience. Demonstrable awareness, from training, hands-on experience or reading around the issues, of what it is makes a website a pleasant experience or not. This usually means having a feel for it, as well knowing some hard facts about techniques for checking your assumptions.
- Web metrics and analytics skills. Because people still talk about “hits” like they’re relevant and these people need telling. I want anyone within a mile of my website to be able to do that telling, and mine the rich seam of user insight to make their content better.
- Training in Acrobat software. If you can’t stop them publishing PDFs altogether at the very least you need your web publishers to know how to make them at optimal file sizes, bookmarked, tagged, and tested for accessibility.
- Image editing and optimisation skills. Because what happens when you don’t train people in this and give them unfettered access to the publishing tools is squashed or stretched aspect ratios, huge file sizes and group shots where you can’t see anyone’s faces. And images can be as effective as good copy (or as damaging as bad).
- Natural Search Engine Optimisation skills. OK, I could have bundled this with ‘writing for the web’ but SEO is an industry (or two?) in itself and the people who load content onto your website need to know about it – to explain why pages aren’t 1st in Google and to make your content as findable as reasonably possible. (By ‘natural’ I don’t mean some kind of innate gift for keywords, I mean not paid SEO.)
- Web search and research skills. Your web editor needs to be fast and thorough at finding relevant content to link to, and be able to find stuff on the site when answering enquiries from users.
Professional knowledge & memberships
- Knowledge of internal standards. Brand guide, style guide, proposition, policy on image dimensions, etc. (Brand manuals are like assholes opinions; everyone’s got one).
- Knowledge of external standards. Knowledge of WCAG and some awareness of W3C standards at the least. In my world there’s also the COI web guidelines. Oh, and just a few laws (DDA, Libel and Defamation, DPA, Copyright, FOI).
- Knowledge of the subject matter. Because you can tell when a website is managed by people who don’t understand the content: it has no related links between pages.
- Knowledge of wider web strategy. Your corporate comms strategy. Industry best practice. In government, the rationalisation & convergence and engagement agendas.
- Membership of relevant networks. For government webbies there’s Digital People and the UKGovWeb Bar/Teacamps which I’d hope all people who touch the website are linked into. Membership of other industry bodies probably too big an ask here.
Personal effectiveness
- Negotiation, explanation and persuasion. See writing for the web, accessibility, information architecture above – all of these things need explaining to people who don’t see why they should care. And often it means persuading senior people (often in both senses) that they can’t have a PDF of a scanned letter on official headed paper on the homepage. Enthusiasm and advocacy helps too, for talking to those customers who don’t think they need to put information on the website at all.
- Customer service and relationship management. Managing web content means managing (however indirectly) a load of busy and disinterested people, coordinating their work and maintaining productive relationships in order to get what you need from them. It also means giving something back, in the form of web analytics and other user feedback to help them realise the value and importance of their web content.
That is, I think, the minimum skillset for a properly professional web publisher. Do you agree?
In a central team which offers consultancy in digital media you would also want to mix in some communications skills and experience (I’m a fan of the GCN core skills, flawed though they may be) and a load of stuff around digital engagement. I’ve recently advertised for a social media bod and, as you’d expect, the skills I’m after there have only slight crossover with the list above.
Incidentally, the stuff you probably don’t need any more if working with a CMS is hand-coding and detailed knowledge of (X)HTML and CSS. In fact, a little bit of this knowledge among a devolved group web publishers can be a pretty dangerous thing…
Related posts (auto generated)
If you enjoyed this post, why not leave a comment or subscribe to my RSS feed to get future posts delivered to your feed reader?
Comments
Thanks for pulling this list together. It’s spot on accurate and I think lots of web managers will find it useful.
I like the point on giving feedback to content providers (from analytics and anecdotal comments) so that they feel their contributions are valued. This is straightforward to do but can have a real positive effect.
@Matt and @Neil: agree about web publishers with XHTML and CSS chops being a dangerous thing!
The last two are almost the most crucial but to these I’d add having an open mind and realising you don’t know everything. It also helps if you have experience outside government. We do tend to be a walled garden, coming up with our own language and reinventing the wheel when it comes to the web.
Doing and managing websites is really rather complicated, especially having a good sense of priorities. It’s easy if you’re not experienced AND open minded to get seduced by the latest new-fangled thing and forget stuff like usability. That’s, in practice, what happens all the time.
It’s also a never ending process so it’s also easy to put stuff off. Especially in government.
With usability (and accessibility, which IMO is usability for a specific user group) it seriously helps not just to have some clue as to the basics – heuristics – but also the people skills to be able to learn directly from users. Being one step removed from actual users can be dangerous.
Great list Neil.
Damn.
Forgot to mention THE missing skill. Some notion of marketing online. This doesn’t necessarily follow from understanding stuff like analytics. Plus we do tend to be terrible at it!
Good call Paul, some digital marketing skills would be handy. Essential for the central team but possibly only desirable in a devolved content publisher?
Kindof ties into your good point about web use skills actually. Knowing the community of interest for content (and ‘marketing’ to them) is a key part of getting it read!
IME devolved publishers do have some idea of their specific online audience but somehow don’t make the connection to them. Most of this is basic common sense but online gov doesn’t have the history there in this area so somehow people leave that part of their brain at the door!
Something strange happens to government brains … I can recall numerous conversations along these disconnected lines. Example: online school registrations – why not recruit MumsNet? ‘But we published a leaflet, mums will have heard of it’ And so on, around in circles …
Great list. I’ve bookmarked it for future reference.
I don’t think this is about being professional. It’s about being effective. The two things are not always the same.
This is good, clear and valuable, Neil.
All I’d want to add would be some degree of knowledge about governance, politics or the policy process – that is to be able to demonstrate a general professional knowledge about the sector.
The best web publishers I have met in government have had this knowledge and have used it to focus their specialist digital skills more effectively.
[...] Beyond cut and paste: the professional skills every government web publisher should have Neil Williams has summarised the core skills required in web publisher or web editing role. The majority of the skills are applicable to any web publisher role, not just within government or public sector. [...]
Thanks everyone, glad you found it useful.
Ross – good call. That’s probably my biggest shortcoming personally, and it’s telling that it didn’t occur to me. Think I need to address this one with a week in a policy or bill team.
This is a great post — I’ve already forwarded it to people needing to get web content staff — but I think it is missing something along the lines of:
* Hands-on experience using social tools. Ability to edit and upload simple videos and manage flickr, twitter and upcoming accounts, and similar.
What do you think?
Pingback to this doesn’t seem to be happening :[
http://paulcanning.blogspot.com/2009/05/why-gov-webbies-need-professional.html
Good manual ping there, Paul. Pingbacks are enabled, so that’s a mystery. Good post, too, and thanks for the props therein. I’m watching the Socitm developments with interest and am still keen to be involved in some way (although, not able to give much time to it..)
Harry – good add, but a deliberate omission on my part as the focus was on devolved publishers doing the old fashioned web management stuff. But you’re right, the lines aren’t really so clear cut. You need this too.
[...] he also grilled them on some of the practical issues of being a jobbing government webby (something he has also covered brilliantly [...]
Control-A, Control-C, Control-V. I couldn’t do my job without it. Life is all about figuring out what works, copying it for your own application, the cutting and pasting it into action. Great post
Hello, I'm Neil Williams. I'm a government web geek, a dad, a husband, a grower of veg, a keeper of hens and a lapsed comedy writer, roughly in that order. 
I like the skills list – when I was running a web team where the web publishing was mainly devolved I used a pretty similar list to help recruit a content manager to help sort out the chaos..it was a surprisingly difficult set of skills to find in one person..
My favourite bit of the entire post though is the final paragraph, might be the truest statement I have ever read