Complementary skills: Thinking for the web and writing for the web

photo credit: Ethan Hein

As an academic, before I started writing a blog, all I thought about was how to conduct my research in a rigorous, theoretically-sound, empirically-testable way. My writing was intended to explain phenomena and describe my research methodology in an accurate and precise way. Then I entered the world of tech (via blogging)

While I began hanging out with tech types, reading tech blogs and engaging on social networking sites, I sometimes continued to write in “academiquese”. My writing was jargon-laden and often abstruse. Then I realized that there was a world out there of things I had never thought about, until I started creating my own website and writing for a broader audience. I designed my research website from scratch and personalized Hummingbird604.com as it is right now.

I began to think about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I learned to write keyword-rich text and found about the meaning of “content strategy“. Copywriting, DNS-propagation and clean URLs all became part of my vocabulary. And as I was having beers with my good friend Susie Gardner (co-author of Blogging for Dummies, in case you were wondering) the other day, I realized that to be successful online, you need to know a bit about how to build websites (thinking for the web) and about how to write compelling content that will be crawled by search engines and found and engage your reader (writing for the web). Susie agreed with my viewpoint, adding that you may not need to be a website builder, but know enough about how to make websites to make your writing shine in said website.

It seems to me as though the most successful people online are those who are able to master, to some solid degree, both sets of complementary skills. What do you think?