Editing rounds for website development

You know how, when you write a book, they assign you different editors? A grammar editor who looks at the book from the point of view of grammar and vocabulary. A technical editor, or factchecker, who checks there are no mistakes in there. A content editor who checks whether you're talking about the right stuff and it's interesting. When you edit text yourself with those hats on, your really find a lot of things you don't if you just try to improve the text without focusing on 1 area. So the same can apply to websites. You can go over a beta site in various rounds, and wear a different hat every time:

• Focus on editing text.
• Focus on writing the right text for usability.
• Do a usability test.
• Focus on the overall layout of each page: does it have a clear beginning? A clear title? A clear focal point?
• Focus on interaction: is it consistent throughout the site?
• And so on.

The advantage of focusing on 1 specific area and spending an hour or 2, 3 doing only that is that you really start to refine the site in a way that just general looking at it wouldn't do. And if you refine it in enough areas, you get something shiny. Nice. Do you use this idea of editing rounds with very specific hats on?

# Nov 15, 2005

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