Editorial Guidelines: Contributing To The Wise-Women Web Site
Members and guest authors can participate in the development of the Wise-Women web site in one of two ways:
1. By submitting an article, tutorial illustration or photo for consideration. While we invite submissions, publication is not guaranteed and is subject to review by our editors.
2. By participating in the ongoing Project Archive.
Benefits
Wise-Women is a not-for-profit volunteer group, and we cannot pay for your work. However, publication on our web site offers many intangible benefits. Contributing an article or graphic will showcase your expertise in a particular area to a very respected and knowledgeable audience, while helping to inspire and educate the web development community. We have a well-established and thriving mailing list and membership base, and our site is also frequently visited by non-members.
Rights
We require that all submissions be your original work (i.e., written/created by you) and not copied or modified from other sources. All materials quoted or referenced from online or print publications must be appropriately sourced, with links provided to online sources.
We do not publish articles of an obviously self promotional nature unless there is a very strong demand for an article about a particular product or subject from our members.
Materials submitted for publication are subject to editing. Once we agree to publish your article on the Wise-Women web site, we will request the right to publish your article electronically for the first time (aka first-run publication rights) and the right to keep it on our web site (aka perpetual, non-exclusive use.) In return, we will give a credit and link back to the author's site(s) and include an author profile. You retain all other author's rights due to you.
If you publish the same article on another site, we would appreciate a link-back to our site and a mention that it first appeared on Wise-Women.
We are aware of and take copyright issues very seriously, especially since several of our members are published authors and established graphic artists. If we discover that submitted work was copied from another source, we will immediately delete it from our site. We will never knowingly publish plagiarized work.
Submission Requirements
Anyone may contribute articles to the Wise-Women web site; however, priority is given to list members. Although the name of our organization is Wise-Women, men do participate in our mailing lists, and we invite editorial and graphic submissions from men and women.
If you are not a list member and have something interesting to say about any of the topics listed below, please submit a query to the editor prior to submitting an article, and include urls of your web site and any of your other online publications. All articles are subject to review and possible editing, and publication is not guaranteed.
All articles and images should include the name(s) and contact information for the author(s) at the beginning of the submission.
We generally prefer articles to be a minimum of 500 words and a maximum of 3000 words in length; however, if the subject matter warrants it, it may be longer or shorter. Very long articles that are accepted may be serialized.
All manuscripts are edited for grammar, conciseness, organization, clarity and appropriateness for our audience. We prefer that articles are written in an active voice and that jargon is kept to a minimum, and we refer to ourselves as "women," &emdash; not girls, chicks or grrls. Please read through our current and past issues to see the general tone and standard we expect.
Keep in mind that visitors to the Wise-Women site are of all levels of expertise, but the majority tend to be web savvy and accomplished. We try to have content that interests all of our visitors:
Articles about
- Web site planning and development as seen from various points of view,
including: back-end and team management, etc.
- Design and graphic development
- Information architecture and usability
- Web standards and accessibility
- Online marketing, advertising and promotion
- Search Engine Optimization
- eCommerce trends
- Online portfolio development
- Intellectual rights management; copyright issues, protection of online
graphics, reproduction rights, etc.
- Technology, business, ethics and gender related issues
- Interviews and profiles of women in web, creative and technology-related fields
- Starting and running a web-related business; small business development and management
- How to find full time, part time or freelance jobs
- Pitching new business, servicing clients and managing relationships
Tutorials and how-tos (for various skill levels)
- HTML, XHTML, XML and other markup languages
- Practical use of CSS
- Flash and other motion graphic techniques and applications
- PDFs
- Client-side scripting (JavaScript, etc.)
- Server-side scripting and database languages (Perl/CGI, PHP, ASP, SSI, etc.)
- How-tos for specific software or hardware products related to web production and design, such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.
File formats for submission
Articles, interviews and tutorials
Please submit all articles and interviews as plain text files with no hard returns. A template is available for your convenience. Do not submit your copy or articles as word processor files (eg Microsoft Word).
You may mark up your article by using HTML tags in a way which reflects the content and structure (rather than appearance): headings, paragraphs, lists. If you have tabular data (eg comparing features of products) then use a simple table. Ensure you include appropriate alt text for any graphics and screenshots.
Please do not include any formatting and layout tags, such as font, size, color, alignment. Do not use tables for layout purposes. All layout and formatting are added by a standard stylesheet.
Any materials submitted in formats other than the above will not be opened.
If you have photos, line art or other graphical images you would like to have considered along with your article, please see the Graphics submission guidelines below.
Graphics
Spot illustrations or photos: If you are intrigued by the idea of creating small illustrations for specific assigned topics, please contact the editor. Please include a couple of samples and/or the URLs of sites where we may view your work.
File formats for graphic files
Please submit your images in JPEG, GIF or PNG format. The dimensions should not exceed 300 pixels x 300 pixels except where specified. Please reduce your file sizes as much as possible using the appropriate software before submitting your work.
Whom to contact
Please contact the Wise-Women Web Site editor.
| 
