Swansea based sub-editor Rebecca Connop Price recommends Writing For The Web course
I wanted to take the Writing For The Web course because although I have been writing news for more than a decade, I had never been given specific instruction on what is the best way to shape a story for the web.
Simon Williams was a great tutor, and although he only had a day to teach us the basics, we managed to cover a lot of topics, including paragraph structure, story lay-out, search-engine optimisation (SEO) and headline-writing.
Because I’m used to working in print, where we are restrained by space, I had got used to writing short headlines with familiar words — but this doesn’t work for the web. Simon taught us that instead of clumsy puns or old-fashioned journalistic words like “pensioner” or “trader”, it’s much better to spell out the details of the story in a headline and standfirst using words that people are likely to use in real life.
Since taking the course, I have already made changes to my blog and I believe they have improved its appeal.
Simon was also very good at making the course relevant for both news writing and publicity writing. It was great value for money and I would recommend it to anyone.