Overview
This website contain tips for editing websites so that they are technically correct—their code is valid, meaning that it complies to W3C standards—and that their content (copy) also contains proper grammar, punctuation, among others. A technical editor is one who should be skillful enough to handle all of the necessary editing functions for most projects. On a staff-of-one, the technical must do everything, unless some special functions are farmed out to others. Someimes, a technical editor works under a managerial editor; at other times, the technical editor is the lead editor.
In addition to acquiring the expertise and skills necessary to perform substantive edits for all documents, technical editors should keep current with the rapidly changing field of website creation. Technical editors of nascent websites should be aware of the innovations that will surely arise. Those changes will usually not occur overnight, so keeping abreast of them only requires some knowledge of current trends so that their own skill sets will not gradually become obsolete so as not to impinge upon their economic, revenue-generating livelihoods.
Technical editors or web designers typically will perform the design, creation, and layout for websites. Copyeditors might edit its content by checking for grammatical errors or for adding, modifying, or deleting text or graphical content. Technical editors often are expected to also perform the copyediting in those cases where only one editor will be employed on very small staffs for doing almost everything—including web design and technical writing. Nevertheless, having “two eyes” of additional proofreaders or copyeditors will often find errors that would otherwise escape detection until somebody might notify the owners or webmasters of the websites.
Also included in this website is a tutorial of sorts demonstrating a method whereby a copyeditor can employ edit-tracking “markup” using an appropriate word processor, such as Microsoft Word, that can directly open a web page and display editing markup that can record the copyediting to send back to the content author and to save for archival purposes.