I’ve picked up a fair amount of experience recently in developing online content.  Sometimes the job has been as straightforward as writing website copy and blog posts, but there have been bigger projects too.

A case in point is the NBC Sports football microsite, which I worked on with the New York office of The Brooklyn Brothers. (Click on the picture below to view a brief tour – though please note that there’s no sound.)

It was a perfect job for me, given my love of football and my experience of writing quiz questions for the Weakest Link.

I had to write: an introduction to every Premier League team for the benefit of a US audience; a glossary of British football terms (handbags, row Z, that sort of thing); a guide to songs and chants (the cleaner ones, anyway); a selection of ready-made tweets for viewers who want to comment on matches using authentic football language; and quiz questions to test how much visitors to the site know about the Premier League.

Of course, not every brief is such a perfect fit, but that doesn’t have to be a problem.  By no stretch could I be considered an authority on technology, but I worked with Velocity on this ebook for Sprint, a large telecommunications company in the US (again, click to read):

I think it’s often an advantage to have little initial knowledge on a subject when you’re trying to explain it to others.  The thing is, if you can write about it in terms which you can understand as a novice, it should be easily intelligible to your readers.  As long as you’re fully and properly briefed, as I was in the case of this ebook, you can get a result.

Oops, lapsed back into football-speak there.