Composition and Design
Warbound Diaries is an online wiki dedicated to preserving the development of a steampunk RPG campaign, consequently informing its bright gold, ivory white, and stark black palette design for the website appearance.
The FIU “Writing for the Web” guidelines encourage overall audience priority, in that the tone and deliverables of the website match that of theirs. Therefore, since the ultimate objective of Warbound Diaries is to sell investment in worldbuilding and storytelling, gears and sparks decorate the overhead menus and website title to properly evoke the feeling of machinery, fulfilling my goal of immersing my audience into a fictional world.
As emphasized from the “Best Practices for Web Writing” by the University of Maryland Baltimore, links must be utilized for relevant information, so the homepage features a widget that externally links to the campaign RPG that the whole of the website revolves around, likewise accompanied by a short sentence, “First Episode Out Now!” to inform users that the link shuttles toward an actual play series.
Similarly, the “Eberron: Forge of the Artificer Review” and “The World of Warbound” include links to referenced products, like previous sourcebooks and published D&D settings. Both posts, in addition to my writing sample, are rife with images from the Eberron setting in order to stimulate visual interest and adjacently chunk content, aligning with the instructions from the first module’s “How do we Write Web Content” page: “Images, video, links, and even audio (at your own risk) are expected.”
It was of paramount priority that all written text for the web was chunked, concise, and easily accessible—which most of my initial drafts lacked in completing—so every single piece of content on the website is broken after around 70-100 words in order to enable skimming, which is suggested by nearly all readings (“Best Practices for Web Writing”, “How do we Write Web Content”, and FIUs “Writing for the Web”).
Our first module presses the significance of journalistic prose—a difficult tonality to balance when my website hinges on fiction writing, but my review best exhibits this mentality best in the now front-loaded content; pure brevity and simplicity, no embellishments (sometimes).
Susan Greene’s, “How to Write a Killer ‘About Us’ Page” states that an effective About page factually answers questions and avoids overselling excitement, so I ensured to answer both the purpose of Warbound Diaries while building upon the vision of the website.
Moreover, the Bio page primarily takes after the description provided in “Web Page and Article Types” in module one; a casual, yet passionate and personal tone of voice.
Lists are employed to better enhance the skimming experience for readers in both my review and “The World of Warbound” post, as was suggested by UMB.
Lastly, all headers and subheadings follow after guidelines presented in “Best Practices for Web Writing” by UMB, “Be short and direct,”, thus all my headings are short phrases like, “Synopsis” or “Price Unbefitting Content” or “Spark Your Imagination”.
Warbound Diaries has the unseen benefit of being a passion project of mine, so I hope a certain level of heart and enthusiasm shines through the text, striking readers to be just as vicariously creative as they possibly can.
Informal Self-Audit
“Warbound Diaries” has been more successful than I initially thought it’d be. It houses a rich and wide variety of images that greatly engross visitors into the fantasy world at the core of the site, a skill that I have frankly trained in being a facilitator for tabletop roleplaying games.
My exercise of web writing has been successful overall, but it took more time adjusting to the rhetorical needs of it than standard academic writing. I think my blogs and reviews display a demonstrable leap in growth with web writing practices, featuring shorter chunked paragraphs, highlighted quotes and topic sentences, abundant images, and a delicately balancing journalistic and fantastical tone.
“Warbound Diaries” is visually thriving and I can confidently assume its content has been enthralling, compelling, and overall distinct.
I struggle to conjure up any faults I hold for my website, but I hope that doesn’t end up being some hubris or Achilles’ Heel of mine. I admit that I have been struggling to adapt lists and bullet points to my content, and I’ve been recently feeling strained to integrate them in a way that feels organic. As for improvements, I harbor countless ideas to spruce up the presentation of the homepage for Warbound Diaries.
For one, I want to heighten the widgets present on the home page to feature TRPG scenarios, worldbuilding prompts, TRPG reviews, and links to socials. I want to improve the “Recent Comments” widget to potentially display favorited comments on certain posts, which promote community interaction!
Since Module 3 is predominantly about video and media, I am eager to integrate recordings of my ongoing TRPG campaign, “Warbound: A Steampunk Odyssey”! It’s a great way to seamlessly transition from worldbuilding to actual play.
SEO Optimization
SEO optimization became paramount amid editorial efforts in Warbound Diaries. Based on data acquired from keyword reports, Warbound Diares suffered from a vital lack of keywords, key phrases, and hyperlinks that severely undermined the search engine qualities for newcoming visitors across the entire website.
Before revisions began, Warbound Diaries hosted an estimated 5.2% in keyword density, criminally low for a statistic that should be more substantial for the benefit of the website.
Therefore, extensive content editing was undergone to ensure the addition of more keywords and phrases, which would, in turn, enhance the optimization of the search engine.
These revisions were accomplished through the application of thorough line edit, syntactical modifications, and consistent rereading, all tactics suggested by MasterClass in their article “How to Self-Edit: 10 Tips for Editing Your Own Writing”.
Keywords like “admit”, “thinker”, “orientation”, and “jewel” were seamlessly integrated into all existing content, with measures taken to maintain organic flow and natural conversational tone, significant factors for an SEO editor to consider when engaged in technical editing as per the guidelines of “What is an SEO editor?” provided by IMeanMarketing.
Take for instance, “Behold the Gallery!”. Its introduction was originally written as, “…but I am ashamed to say that this world is lacking in visual identity”, but with these revisional passes, the introduction now includes the keyword “admit” in its introduction: “We have been discussing the world of Warbound at length now, but I admit that this world is lacking in visual identity.”
Similar objectives were accomplished in other articles like in “Opening Animatic Now Out!”, where the introduction now features a clever employment of “orientation” as one of the keywords, “…a reorientation of the mind…”. This choice was inspired by the variation technique instructed by WordStream’s article, “The Expert’s Guide to Keyword Research for SEO Copywriting“
Several articles were examined for SEO optimization and there was great success in visiting keywords upon their content, as it would take a great level of intricacy and detail to expound about each minute inclusion.
Ultimately, Warbound Diaries has definitively elevated its keyword density through the efforts of comprehensive content editing and SEO revisional rounds, a process heavily informed via practices recommended by MasterClass and IMeanMarketing.
Total Word Count: 1184 words
Website Checklist
Site Navigation
- Home ✅
- About ✅
- Bio ✅
- Contact & Press Release ✅
- Posts/Blog ✅
- Gallery ✅
- Video ✅
- Metacritical Writeup Log ✅
Site Navigation
- Review ✅
- Writing Sample ✅
- Audio feature (podcast/music review) ✅
- Analytics Instructions ✅
- Optimized article (single article incorporating keywords/analytics data) ✅
- Keyword Report ✅
Blog Posts
- Your First Blog Post ✅
- Gallery announcement ✅
- Video announcement ✅
- Audio announcement ✅
- Social media announcement ✅