What is the best software to write and organize written copy / content for a website?

Question

I'm a newbie product manager, looking for tips on how to write and organize text copy for my company's website.

I need to be able to prepare the content for our public site and turn it over to the web designer who publishes it to our live site.

I want our UI team to be able to quickly glance at the copy I write and immediately know where on the page I intend for it to go.

Currently, I'm using microsoft word to write and color code different text to signify where I want specific text to go. It is difficult for the UI guy to immediately know if something goes into the nav bar or into a header or a description below a header. In addition to that, it would be helpful for me to be able to write the copy in such a way that the web designer could copy and paste it into the XHTML without having to go back and manually replace special punctuation characters with the XHTML entities.

What software is out there that will allow a comprehensive solution to these web copywriting issues?

Answer 1

A.) Search for a book on writing for the web. Search for Jakob Nielson material for a basic overview of the idea. It will help more than anything we can say.

B.) It's good if they can quickly glance at the copy and tell where it goes, but you still need to make it explicitly somehow. I.e. don't just send a doc full of text and say, "Put this on the website". That's failure.

C.) Don't mix Word with Markup code. It doesn't generate it nicely. If you want something like that, you should probably use an HTML editor like DreamWeaver or Nvu.

D.) This list was written for the web, rather than print.

Answer 2

WordPress has the ability to paste directly from a word document and retain all of its formatting. I use it for content management where I work and I personally think its great. If your developers implement it well enough you should be able to edit the site yourself with no markup knowledge and no extra software.