Yahoo has released a style guide for writing, editing and creating content in the ‘digital world’. Priced at £13.12 on Amazon.co.uk (currently on pre-order only), it promises to be the ‘Ultimate Sourcebook’.
Here’s the blurb:
Is it Web site, website, or web site? What’s the best on-screen placement for a top story? How can I better know my site’s audience? The rapid growth of the Web has meant having to rely on style guides that are intended for print publishing, such as The Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White’s, The Elements of Style, or The Associated Press Stylebook, but these excellent guides do not address writing for the Internet.
The Yahoo! Style Guide does. Writers and programmers at Yahoo!, faced with a lack of industry guidance fifteen years ago, began cobbling together a set of guidelines for Web writing.
The seeds of The Yahoo! Style Guide were planted with their first in-house reference guide, and Yahoo! content creators have built and added to the guide ever since, making it the go-to manual inside Yahoo!. Polished and expanded for its public debut, this resource will cover the basics of grammar and punctuation as well as Web-specific ways to perfect a site, such as:
• Identifying the audience and making the site accessible to everyone
• Constructing clear and compelling copy
• Developing a site’s unique voice
• Streamlining text for mobile devices
• Optimizing Web pages to increase the chances of appearing in search results
• Streamlining text so that people can read your pages at Internet speed.The Yahoo! Style Guide will help anyone who writes, edits, or designs for the Internet accomplish their work with clarity and precision.
Holy moley. Takes a lot of nerve for yahoo to publish a style guide when it doesn’t require its own writers and editors to use one. Every day they produce some of the most egregious errors on the Web — misspellings, grammatical and punctuation mistakes, factual errors, and some utter non-English. They can’t even figure out if it’s “website” or “Web site” or “web site” or something else. Save your money and use any of a number of resources from credible sources. This style guide is a joke. Check out the thousands of errors compiled by a blogger at Terribly Write (http://terriblywrite.wordpress.com)