from uwebdev (repost to work blog):
1. Spellcheck
2. Check for broken links
3. Tidy up (duplicates, orphans, malformed filenames)
4. Make a descriptive title
5. Don’t cut & paste from Word or other Office products (many of our authors use FrontPage; this is directed at them)
follow-up on point five, which I was curious about anyway:
You have indicated the answer I’m going to give. Lots of folks will say that it’s because Word (and the other apps) creates a ton of nasty code, and that’s true but not compelling, IMO.
What’s compelling is the experience you describe: that making changes to such pasted material can be difficult to impossible. The problem is precisely all that nasty code.
In brief, Word is for word processing, Excel for spreadsheets, and so on, and all are aimed squarely at the printed page. Microsoft has chosen to try to make the cut-and-paste to FrontPage as close to the original as possible. To do this, it inserts acres and acres of inline styles and elements to the tags.
In general, this is very successful. The web page indeed looks much like the original. But the page is tightly structured and highly
interdependent, so if you decide you want to do anything more than change a few words here and there, the page starts behaving in unexpected ways. Worse, the tool set for changing the appearance of a web page are different from the tools set for changing the appearance of a document or spreadsheet, so you can’t even do the “usual” fixes. The result is author frustration, often ending with “I’ll just re-do the thing in Word and then re-paste”.
Which brings me to the most fundamental problem. By starting with Word, the author is starting in the wrong place. Starting in Word
encourages approaching the information from a word processing point of view, using word processing tools for layout and for organizing the information (e.g., the author tends to think of the information as being in a single document; the author thinks in terms of “put this document on the web”, and so on).
By warning people away from this, I try to redirect them to the right starting point: the Web. It’s very painful, especially for all those overworked secretaries who are being expected to do everything they used to do and now become information architects as well. Plus learn the necessary and ancillary tools. I sympathize with them. Their bosses need an anatomy adjustment.
But, however painful, the right place to begin is with your web editor, not your word processor.
interesting additional response (I didn’t know about this feature):
I’ve been teaching our overworked secretaries to Copy text in Word and insert it into their FrontPage web pages by using Paste Special >Normal Paragraphs with Line Breaks. Though it usually means they have to reformat their text, this method leaves out all that truly ugly Word HTML that can cause nightmares down the line.
yet another possibility:
There is another solution that I use that doesn’t require any extra steps or coding.
If you drag the file icon for the Word document you want to convert and drop it onto a blank page in FrontPage, it’ll covert the Word file
from RTF then to HTML. It inserts no “bad” Microsoft code and preserves most of the formatting. It’s like doing the Insert File method, only not as many steps or questions to answer.
the funny (if not ha-ha funny) thing about this whole exchange is that damn near everyone wrote using HTML email, which made that particular digest enormous.