I love writing web content. Love, love, love it!  Where else do you get to write tight, crisp, short headlines and dive way, way down into details?

I worked on my first website back in 1998, for Sony PlayStation.  Since then, I've engaged in content marketing for wineries, routers and switches, restaurants, banks, real estate institutions, wireless carriers, you name it.

But I’ve probably learned the most about writing for the web from years as a web editor for Cisco.com (or CDC).

Business-unit account executives, project managers, and engineers would create piles of buzzword-and-acronym-filled text and email it to us. Our mission: to spin this highly technical straw into gold – or at least text that your average 8th grader could understand, while adhering to web best practices. Turn around a dozen or more of these requests every day, and it’s not long before it becomes second nature.

Since there’s more to web writing than just the writing, I attended Confab Intensive to learn about content strategy—and ended up learning more about writing in the process. The first nugget of wisdom from the conference?  “Nobody will be offended if you take the time to make your writing simpler.” Words to live by—and work by, too.