Technical Writer

• Of all the sites I would love to have developed, the W3Schools site has to be top of my list.

It’s a site for developers, and it teaches you how to build web sites. As a training tool it succeeds on every level a user required. It was created by Hege, Stale and Jan Egil Refsnes. They have done a fantastic job.

Let’s talk first about what it doesn’t have.

• It doesn’t have fancy training videos
• It doesn’t have Flash (except in the Flash tutorial)
• It doesn’t have voiceovers

In fact, at first glance, it looks very much like a site that might have been written in the early days of web design (well designed, but still almost static html). Where are all the bells and whistles that people are used to now?

They don’t need them.

What the site does have, to paraphrase some of their readers, is:

• Easy explanations
• Excellent reference guide
• Try it yourself on-line examples
• Free

Quoting Chris, from About Comments from Visitors on the W3Schools web site.

And also Donoho:

Every link I click takes me to more information I didn’t even know I wanted.

• The layout - makes navigation a non-thought.
• The content - simply expansive.
• The examples - EXACTLY what I need and nothing more.

I dream of building sites that are as easy to use, informative, helpful and productive as this one.

So why is the site so good? What makes it work, and what makes 11 million visitors drop in over a one month period?

Obviously, the writing has a lot to do with it.  The Refsnes can obviously write well. Not only that, they take what most people see as complex technical information and break it down into easily digestible chunks. Even if you don’t think you are technical, try out their Introduction to HTML and see if you can work it out.

But it’s not just the writing. There’s more. There’s the way everything is laid out so you don’t have to look hard to find something. There’s the way the information is chunked so that you don’t have to spend five or ten minutes reading through a tutorial when all you want is, say, a quick refresher on how to use the xslt choose element. There’s the way you don’t get bogged down in extraneous detail, all you get are the basics.  And, of course, there are the examples.

I have to say the Try-It examples on W3Schools is some of the best use of web technology I have seen. And the weird thing is, it’s (relatively) basic technology, deceptivly simple and it’s great.

It also suits its audience. The audience is web developers, and it has the full range of experience covered. Beginners can do the tutorials, experienced users can drop in and look up a quick reference on something they haven’t used in a while.

It’s comprehensive. It provides and introduction to pretty much everything you need to know about web development.

It works.

As another user commented:

I point to your site as an example of how to teach on-line. 

And so do I.

We are all noticing a fairly obvious trend on the web—more video, more pictures, more sound. A lot of people are posting videos now, rather than text blogs. I realise this is the way of the future, and I am starting to feel like a dinosaur because, frankly, I can’t be bothered with most of the multimedia.

I am all for web sites that look good, but my prime aim when I access the web is speed. I am not there to be entertained, I am there to be informed. Multimedia doesn’t give me speed.

Flash sites

Some of the Flash site intros you can see nowadays are brilliant mini movies, but I don’t want to sit and wait for that brilliance to unfold when I could be reading what I want from the site.  If I can’t turn it off after the first time I’m less likely to revisit that site.

Audio

I surf the web with the mute button on.  I want quick, I want clean, and I definitely don’t want odd sounds interrupting my enjoyment of what is currently playing on the stereo.

I have friends, however, who work by sound rather than sight. They never read the error messages.  They know they have clicked the wrong button by the sound the error produces.

I often intend to listen to the podcasts on Tech Writer Voices, but don’t, simply because it takes time and concentration to do so. I must be doing something that I am not totally involved in, thus not writing, so that I can listen with half an ear to the podcast.

Graphics

Pictures are great. You can take them in at a glance, decide whether it’s worth stopping or whether to move on.

Video

The problem with videos on the web is that you have to watch them. By the time you have decided whether the video is worth watching or not it’s half over, and you have wasted minutes of surfing time.

Words

I can tell in the first paragraph or two whether I want to keep reading more.

From this you can tell that my web browsing habits are higly visual and based around skimming sites for information, rather than as an entertainment. The problem with audiovisual media such as videos and podcasts is that it slows me down to normal speed. I can’t skim if I have to stop to listen or watch.

As the web evolves the audio-visual is becoming more prevalent. It will be interesting to see if people like me can change our habits—whether we adapt or die.

I could write these blogs using native html. It wouldn’t be hard, although it would take longer, particularly to add the links once I have finished. If I was keen enough, I could even link it to a table and use calls to the database to get the information back.

I don’t.

I don’t because I use WordPress, and WordPress does it all for me.

I often wonder whether Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, had any idea of how much impact Word Press would have on the blogging community, and had he known, whether that would have made him too nervous to start.

The UK Guardian on 4 November 2006, has an article on Web 2.0, and a bit about some of the major players in Web 2.0.  Matt Mullenweg is one of them.  Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) is another, as are the founders of Blogger, Technorati, Feedburner and so on.

These people are changing the web as we know it, allowing ordinary users to do things—such as create blogs—that were previously the domain of a technically savvy few.