Quality Processes for Your Blog
About This Document
The briefing document provides advice on implementing quality assurance processes for the content of your blog, including the establishment of appropriate editorial processes, identification of an appropriate writing style, mechanisms for minimising spam and approaches to ensuring you blog contains quality content.
Quality Process Issues
There are two important quality issues for blogging success - style and content. Readers of your blog will notice poor spelling or grammar, and unstructured ramblings are unlikely to maintain your reader's attention.
Using the following techniques and tips can help improve the quality of your blog. If you are uncertain about your content or writing style, try working collaboratively with a colleague who is willing to check your material before posting.
Editorial Processes
Most blog sites allow you to save and preview your posts before publishing. Using these functions allows you to reflect on the content and review the spelling, grammar and general 'readability' of your post before making it live. It also allows you to see how any embedded media such as slides or videos will appear and whether paragraphs and text are spaced correctly.
Writing Style
A good writing style will help maintain your blog reader base. Blogs are known for their short, informal style that allows for quick, easy scanning of content.
It is very important to check your posts for accuracy in spelling and grammar. Unfortunately spell-check is not a function available on all blog writing pages, so it may help to copy and paste your work into a word processing document to help find errors.
If you have a group or collaborative blog, it may help to set out some guidelines on the feel you want posts to have - will they be formal, informal, lengthy, minimalist, will images be included, how will you reference links and so on. You may also wish to agree on how tags are to be used and standardise them.
Policies On Comments
Deciding whether you will open your blog to moderated or un-moderated comments is another issue for consideration. Think about your audience and the scope of your blog to help with this decision.
Minimising spam is another important quality process. Unfortunately all blogs need to be monitored for spam or inappropriate material, and employing a spam-filter such as Akismet [1] is sensible.
Content Quality
Good content is what makes your audience return to your blog or subscribe to your RSS feed to see when updates appear. Setting down quality measures for the content of your blog helps to build a reader community, and has the added benefit of making it an easier transition for new authors wanting to know what you write about on the blog. Do your posts capture current issues or techniques? Are you relating experiences or activities that will benefit a community of users?
Successful blogs are those which capture the reader's interest. Many blog authors add small pieces of their lives, outside of the blog topic to personalise their content and help readers relate to the author. However you should first establish a policy which determines whether this is acceptable for your blog.
Once you've posted your blog post, standard practice is that it remains unchanged, except for minor typographical changes. If changes are significant or needed to clarify a point, good practice dictates that a note or addendum is added to the original post, or the text font is changed to 'strike-through'.
Make sure your blog posts are marked with the date and time of posting and, on a multi-author blog, the name of the person posting.
Document Your Processes
It may be useful to outline in your blog policies the quality processes through which your blog will be subjected. Not only does this help with consistency in the content and how it's presented, but it gives your readers an understanding of the processes your material has undergone before release. As an example, see the UK Web Focus's blog policy [2] . You may also wish to carry out a periodic evaluation of your blog policies to see whether modifications or enhancements may be appropriate.
References
- Akismet,
<http://akismet.com/> - Blog Policy, UK Web Focus Blog,
<http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/blog-policies/>
