Getting It Right: Online Editing and Publishing

In Carroll's chapter, “Getting It Right: Online Editing, Designing and Publishing," the fundamentals of online editing and publishing are outlined. He presents a step-by-step process. This process is critical in order to understand how to properly formulate your own online content.

1. Identify reader and audience and purpose of content: It is important to consider the readers’ needs such as their browsers, connection speeds, hardware/software, etc.
2. Define document structure and links: All pages should be able to stand to operate independently. The site should be easy to navigate - links within text but also to other pages on the site
3. Define the Style: A consistent presentation/style should be presented for all pages
4. Edit/CopyEdit: Reviewing and editing content for consistency of all elements should start when the site is created and continue throughout the entire building process.
5. Write Headlines: Written in a direct style since readers don't always have background information to interpret a headline’s meaning
6. Test Usability: Test the tasks that readers will want to perform on the website since this is the main reason you are creating the website.

I have never created an independent website, however I have worked with multiple blogs that I have customized. My most successful blog website was one that was hosted on Blogger. The purpose of this blog was to document my journey throughout Tanzania, East Africa on my May Experience last summer. I didn't realize it at the time, and really had no experience in how to maintain a blog website, but I followed Carroll's step-by-step process to some extent.

I made my blog public so that anyone with Internet access was free to view it. I knew that my family members, professors, and friends were reading my blog posts, so I made sure that I was putting out information that would be acceptable to all of these groups of people. I had a specific layout for my blog, and made sure that the post pages were in the same theme as the homepage. All of my blog posts contained information about my daily experiences, and could be considered a dairy style blog. My trip to Tanzania is over, but I still periodically check up on the blog to make sure that the links are working. Even though I'm not actively updating my blog, it is still on the Internet, so people are still viewing it.