⊹ ࣪ ˖ Spark Your Imagination ⊹ ࣪ ˖
Greetings soldiers and visionaries! I come bringing exciting news, as the world of Warbound is soaring to new heights with the release of our newest socials. Venture uncharted lands and check them out:
But, if you’re left wandering no man’s land, visit our updated Contact page. You can fire an email at the Warbound team to answer your steaming hot questions, and also read our first official press release for our website, Warbound Diaries!
⊹ ࣪ ˖ Spark Your Imagination ⊹ ࣪ ˖
Been looking for more stories to immerse yourself in? Of course you have! Warbound Diaries all but tantalizes with the jewel of an original steampunk world, brimming with new characters and stories.
And you have the fortune to be introduced to one of these characters! Meet, Akio Eteiya, a clumsy, timid Khorvarian engineer who finds himself waking in the bed of a handsome, charismatic sailor! Visit the Icarus Audio-Book page to follow Akio’s humiliating morning, one full of hijinks, comedy, and a budding romance that will cast this architect into the waves of obsessive passion! Check out Icarus now, and remember, innovators, to:
⊹ ࣪ ˖ Spark Your Imagination ⊹ ࣪ ˖
At its core, Warbound Diaries is a collaborative project that shares and revels in the art of storytelling. I am not the only innovator here! Everyone, even you, have a story to tell, a world to build, and fates to forge, and they deserve to be shared with the world.
And to better share it, I have uploaded an instructional guide on how to integrate Google Analytics into WordPress, enabling you, my trust innovators, to better track, analyze, and monitor your own website’s traffic! With this trusty tool, you can become the diviner and better tailor the reader experience, ensuring that your story is one that will…
⊹ ࣪ ˖ Spark Your Imagination ⊹ ࣪ ˖
User Test Report for: Stephanie’s World
Prepared by Felipe Vargas for Dr. Vytautas A. Malesh and Stephanie Loor
This report offers a thorough appraisal of Stephanie Loor’s website, “Stephanie’s World”, examining its efficacy in web writing practice and reviewing its accessibility as a personal blog.
This report determines in its evaluation that Loor’s site largely adheres to the requisite web writing principles provided by Dr. Malesh and his course materials, which promotes usability, complete content, and stylistic writing—criteria that Loor sufficiently meets according to the evaluation of this report.
Loor demonstrates steady control over their tone and authorial voice, shifting to an authentic and intimate writing style for their blog posts and an informative, promotional voice for their review. All mandatory content is arranged and accounted for, yet there remain areas that Loor can further elevate, such as:
“Stephanie’s World” is an apt name for the website, for the reader is truly welcomed and absorbed into Stephanie’s world; that’s mistimed break-ups and pure musical passion for mixing and DJ’ing.
The care and attention to the subject is undoubtedly palpable, as there is an utter knowledge on display for music production that amplifies the credibility of the speaker, but this content is ultimately hindered by its lack of stimulating visual design and chunking, which damages the capacity for the brisk reading pace typically set by online readers.
“Stephanie’s World” excels at writing a uniquely personal blog post about the interests of one Stephanie, but it staggers in its ability to effectively satisfy the needs of visitors. If “Stephanie’s World” can improve its application of web writing to further inform its audience, then “Stephanie’s World” can truly be professional-grade.
“Best Practices for Web Writing” by the University of Maryland Baltimore recommends that, “Readers expect a personal, upbeat tone in web writing. They find bureaucratic writing offensive and out-of-place and ignore the message it’s trying to convey.”
Loor shows a masterful control over the expected web writing tone, one that cleverly balances their candid, nakedly honest style with the conversational informality of blog writing.
“Web Article Style” by Dr. Malesh guides web writers to “insert an image”, because pictures have the merit of enhancing the aesthetic and visual interest of pages while continually reinforcing information to the reader.
Loor exercises this practice quite well in such a manner that it emphasizes the tone of their blog, maintaining a light and often humorous visual attached to their content.
“Stephanie’s World” doesn’t quite maintain the recommended site architecture recommended by Dr. Malesh, which stipulates that the About page should directly channel into the Author’s Bio and that, “Your metacritical write-ups… should be accessible only via a link you send me and not off the home page.”
I recommend that Stephanie adjust their menus to merge the About Vision page with the Author Bio page to better adhere to professional site architecture. Moreover, I advise Stephanie to consider creating categories for their posts and place their metacritical self-assessment under its own separate category off the home page menus.
In “Web Page and Article Types” by Dr. Malesh, he writes that, “The ‘about’ page explains the purpose of the site… But what is the site doing… What is the site here to do?”
Stephanie Loor adequately answers this question in their About/Vision page, but I advise that there is clearer, more specific language utilized to inform readers about what the site truly is, as there is a great dearth of factual information within the current draft of the About pages, which is both recommended by Susan Greene in “How to Write a Killer ‘About Us’ Page” and William Craig in “Guidelines for Writing a Good About Page”.
Both Dr. Malesh in “Web Article Style” and “Best Practices for Web Writing” press the importance of brevity, simple sentences, and short paragraphs, respectively: “A paragraph should consist of 70 words or fewer.”
In most of Loor’s content, there are sections that nearly extend past 200 words. These areas are in need of chunking to promote skimming and a brisk reading pace.
“Stephanie’s World” is a promising launching pad into the mind of Stephanie Loor, because the writing and tonality drive this raw sense of candor and truth that renders the blog a deeply engaging and personal reading experience.
But “Stephanie’s World” can better enhance this potential through improved formatting, chunking, and navigation. Subsequently, Susan Greene in her article, ““How to Write a Killer ‘About Us’ Page”, advises readers to tell a story: “… the best public speakers often communicate their information by telling personal stories. Apply that winning technique to your About Us page and you’ll forge a connection with your visitor.”
Stephanie Loor’s website is at its pinnacle quality when it attempts just this: telling a story, whether relatable or otherwise, and Loor’s Bio is lacking in this storytelling aspect. What are their humble beginnings and why, as a visitor to their site, should we invest ourselves in these anecdotes?
With more narrative and anecdotal focus on Loor’s life and personal interests, I feel that “Stephanie’s World” can truly catapult us into… Stephanie’s world.
Warbound Diaries is the archived prep of a TTRPG campaign, and what is the core of TTRPGs if not an invitation to imagine, a reorientation of the mind, permission to dream of a world greater than our own.
And with the release of the official Warbound Opening Animatic, you, too, can be invited into this realm of visceral possibility and fatal adventure! It’s grossly unjust that my readers aren’t given their fair share of play in this TTRPG world, one where their innovations are actualized and corporeal. Let us revel in the fruits of our creation, and witness our words made manifest in this official Opening Animatic!
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.
“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 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.