MWS Newsletter: Volume 3, Issue 2

Rethinking Online Proofing

Complete Archives and Subscription Information

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Prior to starting Minnick Web Services, I was a copyeditor for a couple of highly technical magazines. Before that, I worked at a small weekly newspaper where one of my responsibilities was to write the obituaries. These two jobs—one involving editing blocks of programming code for print and the other writing the details of a person's life and death in a very standard format—taught me a lot about the importance of accuracy.

Every part of a newspaper or magazine is meticulously copyedited, proofed, spell-checked, and tested. Typos fall through the cracks, but because the cost of fixing them is so high, a lot of work is done on the front-end to try to prevent them.

Things are a bit different in ePublishing and software publishing. There are several reasons for this. The traditional and most obvious explanations for the larger number of typos that make it into online publications and Web sites are that the cost and time required to fix mistakes online are small, and customers and readers generally value time-to-market over perfection.

There's a third reason, however, that online publications aren't copyedited as well as paper ones: red pens don't work online.

The typical method for editing web pages is to read the page looking for errors, then switch to an email window to describe what and where the errors are. The other method we see, which is more time-consuming but slightly more accurate, is to print out the page, mark it up, and then email the changes to the production person.

Both of these methods are less convenient and more prone to error than simply editing a document on paper or in a word processing program.

I've been thinking about how to solve this problem lately, and last week our programmer intern, Kevin McClusky, and I designed a first version of an online proofing system for ePublications: the eBookHost eProofer.

The idea behind the eProofer is to enable clients and designers to post comments, corrections, and questions in the same window while browsing an online publication. As corrections are made, anyone (client or developer) can mark them complete. Currently, the eProofer works for eBooks developed using Minnick Web Services' Flash ePublications. In the future, we plan to develop versions of the eProofer for standard HTML pages and other types of eBooks.

You can check out version 1.0 of the eProofer by going to demo.ebookhost.com and clicking the eProofer link on the left. Please let me know if you think eProofer would be useful for your organization and how we might modify and improve it to suit your needs better.

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On a related note, Minnick Web Services now officially offers copyediting services. Contact Chris or Margaret for more information.

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For more information about how Minnick Web Services can help you achieve your goals, please visit our (newly redesigned) web site
(http://www.minnickweb.com) or contact us.

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Chris Minnick
Minnick Web Services
www.minnickweb.com
www.ebookhost.com
Phone: 916-551-1453
Fax: 916-551-1454

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FUTURE ISSUE PREVIEW:

Future issues of the Minnick Web Services newsletter will cover topics such as:

Understanding Web site Stats
Basics of Web Design
Usability
Accessibility
Important New Web Technologies
Evaluating New Web Technologies
How Search Engines Work
Search Engine Optimization

If you would like to suggest a topic for a future newsletter issue, please send mail to newsletter@minnickweb.com

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