Why is HTML Knowledge Important for Content Writers?

Content writers are the people who fill the world with words, whether it is  internet web pages, leaflets, newsletters, blogs, magazines, press releases and everything else that requires writing. Content writers are required for writing advertisement, campaigning slogans, TV commercials, brochures and many more things. Content writers have been there for a long time, and have been called different names in the past, being scribers, copywriters or Slaves of the Pen. The internet is always hungry for new and refreshing content to be read by the billions of people online and hence content writing is one of the most sought after profession when it comes to modern day writing.

As we progressed from writing with quill and ink and are moving swiftly towards bringing the global digital revolution, the internet has become home to most of the content being produced today for the whole world to read. All the newspapers and magazines have online portals, and the e-books have had the bookworms swarming the internet to find their favorite books. But writing for the internet is not exactly as you would write for a publisher, as the internet has its own language which is known as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). All the websites on the internet basically comprise of the HTML, and thus the content that goes into these websites needs to be in HTML format too. Whether it is a website or a blog, managing the content on these websites has become much easier with the integration of CMS (content management system such as WordPress and October CMS) and which makes a step easier for the content writers, hence they need to know just the basics of HTML and have workaround knowledge of it to provide the kind of organized content required.

Being a content writer without acute knowledge of HTML and publishing your content online can be disastrous because:

• Copying and pasting your content directly from Word into the content management software will generate a markup that will be meaningless. Although your article may seem alright, but the search engines such as Google and Bing won’t be able to understand it.
• You take the effort to make a title or a heading stand out from the rest of the content and change its size and color. The visual effect may seem like what you desired but it won’t make sense in coding.
• Any other person who has to edit your content will have a lot of trouble to do it since the top level headings would be messed up.
• When you decide to change your content management system (CMS), your content won’t be ported into the other one without significant errors.

Due to these reasons, for all medium and top level content editors and content writers are required to possess knowledge of HTML since it has become a basic necessity. Although most companies have HTM-savvy content editor to help convert those entire Word document content into HTML format for the internet, there are some places in the content where it is not their responsibility for adding the online content.