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Would you hire someone to write your FAQs/web content?

Posted: Sat Dec 20, 2008 9:57 pm
by Laura-Jane
I'm a professional web writer, but I'm starting to focus on writing web content, FAQs, etc for developers.

A lot of developers dislike (read: hate!) writing the content, FAQs, about pages, etc. for their sites and web apps. I've also come across some amazing apps that could just use a quick once-over to clean up grammar.

I live in Canada, but I'm used to collaborating with tools like BackPack, Project Pier, etc. I'm quite often sub-contracted by designers and developers--sometimes without the clients' knowledge.

Can you see yourself hiring out this kind of work? Do you think this would be useful? Would you consider hiring someone on contract to do this on a per-project basis?

I'd love to hear any thoughts on this subject.

Thanks for any feedback you have to share!

Laura-Jane

Re: Would you hire someone to write your FAQs/web content?

Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2008 10:02 am
by Syntac
Hell, I'd do this sort of thing for free. I'm really bored.

O' course, it depends on what you have in mind.

Re: Would you hire someone to write your FAQs/web content?

Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2008 7:54 am
by Laura-Jane
Thanks for your response, Syntac.

I'm not sure whether I was clear enough in my original post.

Basically, my question is whether any of you would consider hiring a writer like me in any circumstance.

Example: You're doing web design and the client wants you to write the website's content as well. You might consider sub-contracting to me if you hate doing that kind of thing. Doing this can be cheaper for you in the end because you can focus on the technical aspects and offload the content writing to someone else...which gives you more time to take on more projects.

Example: You've written a web app, but you need someone to play around with it, write some instructions and FAQs, etc.

I can think of lots of other examples, too.

I'd like to know your thoughts because I am deciding whether it's viable to target people like you guys with advertising for my business, etc.

I think it's viable, but I also get the sense that a lot of you are super independent and don't like sub-contracting out to people like me, because, of course, it's a lot more complicated when you involve other people in a project.

Hopefully that's a little clearer. Thoughts?

Re: Would you hire someone to write your FAQs/web content?

Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2008 11:17 am
by John Cartwright
At our company we do this regularly. Our programmer's time is much better spent programming rather than writting. From my experience, programmers are not the best writers anyways.

We leave the programming to professionals, so it only make sense we leave the writing to professionals as well.

Re: Would you hire someone to write your FAQs/web content?

Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2008 4:26 pm
by Laura-Jane
You put it very nicely, JCart: a programmer's time is better spent programming.

Thanks for your response. Your comments solidify what I've been thinking exactly. :)