Writer's Guidelines

Evolt.org is an international web development community. In our ranks you will find designers, coders, database developers, web novices and seasoned professionals. This community is brought together though an active mailing list and companion web site featuring articles and commentary from the web development community at large.

Evolt.org is not-for-profit and entirely volunteer-run. Evolt.org is for open and free knowledge sharing.

Get to know us

If you haven't written for evolt.org before, please take a walk through our Web site and familiarize yourself with our existing material. Our site holds hundreds of member-submitted articles, covering a range of web development topics. Here's how to get to the heart of who we are and what we need:

• Check out our most recent articles by looking at what is on our index page.
• Search the site to see if an article similar to the one you'd like to write is on our site already.
• Visit the index page of the category you're interested in to see what has been written recently.

Style

Writing for the web is very different than writing for print. Keep your sentences short and to the point. If you can, break up your article into short sections with descriptive sub-heads so that the reader can scan (see Good Examples below).

While our core audience is composed of web developers, avoid overloading your article with jargon. Be sure to spell out acronyms and provide short explanations or footnotes as necessary.

Structure

The hardest time in writing an article is when you have a blank screen in front of you, and you're thinking "Where do I start?". Take a look at the How-to How-to for a useful skeleton that most articles can use as a jumping off point.

Good Examples

The following is a list of articles written for evolt.org that we feel are excellent examples of the kind of writing and topics we are looking for:

• "640 x 480 Isn't Dead Just Yet" posted in Visual Design.
  This article uses clear headlines to enable the reader to scan the lengthy article and glean the main points and areas of particular interest.
• "My Awesome Adventure at Company-X" posted in Commentary & Society.
  An anecdotal piece written in a conversational style.
• "Why 'Bobby Approved' is Not Enough" posted in IA/Usability.
  Short and simple, this article covers one aspect of the complex Web-access issue and fostered some interesting discussion.
• "Writing Smart Web-based Forms" posted in Code.
  A lengthy but in-depth article which does a good job of outlining basic concepts and various approaches with code samples as explanation.

Submit an article

To submit an article or an idea for an article, you need to first be a member. Sign up here for a login name and password. You can also subscribe to our active web development mailing list to get an even better idea of who evolt.org is and the type of articles that are of interest to the web development community.

If you have an idea for an article but aren't sure whether it is appropriate for us, send a note to us with your idea and someone from the admin group will get back to you with feedback and/or a go-ahead.

If you are a member and have written an article, go ahead and submit it. Please be sure that you have double-checked and edited your own article for grammar, continuity and consistency before you submit it. We recommend that you write and edit the piece locally on your computer before cutting and pasting into our submission form. You may want to use markup to create bold headings or other formatting -- be sure to read through the coding style guide FAQ to learn what tags are appropriate.

A submitted article will go into the queue for admin approval. One or more members of the admin team will read it, edit it for grammar, code and content and either contact you with changes or approve it. Once approved, your article will be live and on the home page.

Evolt.org does not accept vendor-submitted articles (articles written by a company or its representatives designed to promote or publicize a commercial product, company or event).

Rights

Evolt.org owns one-time rights to your work which means that we own the non-exclusive right to publish your work and you are free to republish your article elsewhere. Should you republish an article which first appeared at evolt.org, we think it'd be really cool if you felt like noting that like this, "This article first appeared on Evolt.org."

Compensation

Evolt.org is a non-profit organization and can offer no financial compensation for articles written. By writing for evolt.org, you are giving back to the web development community. It will make you feel good.