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Event report: Editing for the web – it really starts with the user

2 April 2025 | April 2025, Newsletters

By Carolyn Page AE

On 4 March 2025, Editors NSW hosted an excellent presentation, “Editing for the web” by Cathy Nicoll AE. Jennifer Rowland AE was MC, with Marita Smith AE wrangling Zoom.

Cathy is a content designer and editor who has been managing websites since the mid-1990s. She has worked through several content management systems, the discovery of accessibility, and a new awareness that content is again king with AI. Cathy’s background is in environmental management, science and teaching, but she has expanded her interests by trying to make government content usable and interesting enough for people to want to read and apply it. 

Three powerful ideas emerged from her presentation: 

“Our core role is that we actually advocate for the reader.” 

As an editor, you need to communicate your understanding of the audience: why they are going to a particular part of content, what is driving them, how they get there and what they are searching for when they get there. 

It makes us translators, in effect, as we do our structural or substantive editing and we’re bridging that gap between subject matter expertise and public understanding and making it accessible.

You will often come across an agency that has not kept up and “you’ll need to sort of talk them into the modern age”. The more you understand web publishing, the more intelligent your conversations with the UX (user experience) designer will be – and your opinions and recommendations will be more highly respected. 

We know that some publishing formats are unsuitable for some readers. For example, for accessibility reasons we do not use colour (on its own) to denote meaning – but there are people who need colour to see the difference in things. 

You can’t exclude one group of people because another group of people can’t use it.

Non-decorative images must have meaningful alt text and sufficient colour contrast for people to be able to benefit from them. Transcripts, descriptions and captions are needed for people who are without video or without audio. The reader’s context will also affect the options open to them (for example, if they are at work and want to watch the video but cannot have the sound on; or if they only want to hear the audio). 

“We’re not writing PDFs for PCs anymore.”

Cathy told participants that information seekers don’t read for information in the way they used to – they use content. There is “good academic research and metrics” on how readers scan a page, what they pick out of it, and how that affects some of the structures that we add to pages when we are editing them. 

With the advent of Facebook, and with internet access now available to approximately 94% of Australians and New Zealanders, the internet has become the main source of news for many of us. This information is largely accessed on small devices – predominantly smart phones – rather than on PCs. And since Web 2.0, people have been switching off reading and are looking to images – high-quality images, videos and apps – to tell them the story.

A study by the World Bank has shown that because of changes in the way people read, PDFs have become “a terrible medium” for imparting information. However, the nature and purpose of a publication determines its format. “If it’s six to eight pages, that’s definitely got to be a web html page.” But long-form documents, research papers and annual reports are going to be PDFs, because “if you think of who your primary audience is for those, they’re probably not going to be people who are reading on a phone!”

“The editor’s role is quite different.”

Cathy finds it useful to skim-read the text at the start because it affects the headings and how we structure content on the pages: 

You only get the chance to have a first impression once, so make the most of it! … You want to get the reader; hook them; keep them. You always start with your main point. It’s really important because when people spend their 1.2 seconds deciding whether they’re going to stay on the page … it’s what search engines will start with.

Participants enjoyed a quick look over our shoulders at things we no longer do: 

  • We used to care about the page layout and breaks, but with HTML you no longer have control over line breaks, widows and orphans; the layout and flow are vertical; and you can’t do big blocks of text. 
  • Paper sizes and paper stock mattered because they affected the weight and cost of printing and postage; now we look at devices and resolution, file sizes and bandwidth. But rural bandwidth and download times still affect the image sizes that you can use.
  • We used to care about CMYK, registration black and getting the colours perfect; now it’s RGB, colour contrast and web-safe colours.
  • In place of scissors and glue, we use tracked changes and comments, control (or command) c and control v.

Some further reading recommended by Cathy

If you want to understand the workflow of digital content creation and editing, Cathy recommends The editor’s companion by Janet McKenzie and The design manual by David Whitbread. Other valuable sources include:

A recording of this speaker event is available to purchase until Sunday 15 June 2025.