How to Write an “I’m leaving my job” Email That Won’t Burn Bridges You’ve given HR your two weeks notice. You’ve archived your email, returned the back issues of professional journals to the company library, even packed up your sad-looking work sweater and black...
Articles
Resource List: Brand Books
If you're creating or updating your company's Brand Book, you might need a little inspiration. Brand Books to review online or download Adobe Corporate Brand Guidelines Boy Scouts of America Brand Identity Guide Cornell University Brand Book Cork, Ireland's Brand Book...
The Bite, The Snack, And The Meal: How To Feed Content-Hungry Site Visitors
Writing good web content is a lot like planning a big dinner party.You're looking forward to having lots of guests, but you're not sure about when they'll arrive or how hungry they'll be. You know Deborah will only nibble on the salad, Laura will snack on the chicken,...
Eight Essential Writing Skills for Techies
We begin this issue with a bold statement: technical people need adequate writing skills. Though we realize many techies despise writing—“I hated English; that’s why I became an engineer in the first place”—techies in today’s workplace need to be able to write. ...
Teaching Offshore Agents To Write American E-Mail
This article will be especially useful to you if you manage a contact center and employ offshore customer service agents (in India, the Phillipines, etc.) who write e-mail to American customers. But if you're more concerned with online writing for global...
Tips for an Effective Contact Us Page
By Monte Enbysk, Microsoft Office Live Small Business This article is written about us, not by us! Many thanks to Microsoft's Monte Enbysk for permission to reprint. One of the hardest-working but most underrated pages of any Web site is the "Contact Us" page. It...
Web Writing for the World: Five Tips On Writing For Global Readers
For many of your users, American English is not their first language. They may be across the world or across the street. If you are doing business on the web, you can't afford to ignore your global readers. How can you welcome these global customers and make your site...
Re-Launch Lessons Learned the Hard Way
We thought we were pretty savvy about web projects. After all, we've worked with numerous clients on their re-launches and we thought we'd learned from their mistakes. So why was our own re-launch as slow and painful as giving birth to a baby elephant? It turns out...
Writing Competitive E-Mail
E-mail is a prized tool for small business. It allows you to communicate quickly and frequently with your customer. It doesn't matter that your competitor can afford a fancy logo and expensive stationery. E-mail puts you on an even footing. With e-mail, what you say...
Answering E-Mail From Angry Customers: How To Turn Furious People Into Fans
In a perfect world there would be no angry customers. The product would work flawlessly, it would arrive on time, and no customer would wait—listening to elevator music—for 30 minutes. But absent that perfect world, you will have angry customers. And they will send...