Often an interactive copywriter will need to write, fix, or replace some copy on a pre-existing website. Sometimes, you need to “write to space” or you need a quick and dirty comp to show your team or the client. Rather than involve development or design and burn costly hours, with a little bit of HTML knowledge and a few free online tools, copywriters can take things into their own hands.

3 tools you'll need before we get started:

• The latest version of Mozilla Firefox
• Pearl Crescent Page Saver extension for Firefox
• Web Developer Toolbar extension for Firefox

1. To begin, install Firefox and the extensions, and open any page in the Firefox browser. (For this example, I'll be using our #SXSBX hub site, switching the copy to past tense.)

2. After the page loads, click Miscellaneous > Edit HTML on the Web Developer toolbar.

3. A window will pop up showing the HTML code for the page. You can use the search box to navigate to the bit of copy you want to replace.

4. Once you find the copy, you can then simply replace it in the textbox window (keeping any HTML code in tact) and the updated copy will appear in the browser with its original style.

5. Once you have the copy just right, you can now copy and paste the code into a text editor and send it to your dev team. Or, if you need a comp of the page, you can navigate to the Pearl Cresent camera icon, click the drop-down menu, and click Save Image of Entire Page. A dialog screen will appear, allowing you to save a .png file of the page to your hard drive.

6. Find the .png on your hard drive, and voila! You have a perfectly usable comp:

Check out our #SXSBX hub page →

We're big fans of clear, straightforward language here at Springbox, but every once in a while one of us lets a piece of corporate jargon pass our lips. We decided to get something good out of our verbal transgressions and charge offenders per foul—you say an obnoxious corporate buzzword, you put money in the box. We're donating the proceeds to the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians. 

So watch your mouths, Springboxers, or have your dollar bills handy. Here are some resources for keeping it clean around the office:

• Unsuck It
  The folks at Mule Design ask, “What terrible business jargon do you need unsucked?” Type in your buzzword, they'll give you a replacement. They also have a good (but infrequently updated) blog, Necessary Trouble. (If there's an ancestor of Unsuck It would be have to be George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language.”)
  
  
• Center For Plain Language
  ”The Center for Plain Language wants government and business documents to be clear and understandable.” Lots of great information on their website. Check out their blog, where the most recent post makes a case for plain language as part of web usability. (Even the federal government is getting in on the plain language movement with PlainLanguage.gov.)
  
  
• Economist Alfred E. Kahn's 1977 Memo
  “If you can’t explain what you’re doing in plain English, you’re probably doing something wrong.” Sent to his colleagues at the Civil Aeronautics Board, this memo is still a huge inspiration today. Should be posted on all cubicles, everywhere.

What corporate buzzwords would you put on your naughty list? Tell us in the comments below, and feel free to borrow the idea and start a buzzwords box at your office. 

We’re happy to announce the appointment of Leland Means as vice president and general manager of Springbox. Previously serving as director of business development and account services, Leland will oversee daily operations and will continue to lead global business development. Leland took some time out of his busy schedule to talk with us about his background, his interests, and his vision for the future of Springbox.

Tell us a little bit about your background.

I’m a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, so I’m a long-time Austinite. Before Springbox, I was a German translator in the Air Force (this has actually come in handy twice over the past year with some of our global clients), a General Manager at Whole Foods, and an executive at Dell. I’ve always sought out roles that combine marketing, business, and technology, and this role definitely fits that profile.

What do you love about working at Springbox?

The people. It’s inspiring to work with a team of wildly talented and passionate people who eat, sleep, and breathe their craft. We seek out the very best, and I take advantage of the fact that I work with true interactive marketing experts. I’m constantly in learning mode, always asking lots of questions.

The way we’re structured drives our work—we have an open office layout in the heart of downtown, we’re the right size, and we have all the talent in-house under one roof, which drives collaboration and innovative solutions for clients. The “labs environment” doesn’t stop there: the team is constantly developing new internal tools to streamline our workflow and free external tools like Mobilizer we want to share with our peers.

We also have a lot of fun and take great pride in our company culture. Let me put it this way: I got to wear a kilt to our last Halloween party.
 
What trends in interactive do you have your eye on?

I have a great appreciation for infrastructure—I recently watched Long Distance Warrior, a documentary about MCI’s CEO Bill McGowan, and how MCI was the first to lay out a microwave “line” from St. Louis to Chicago for long-haul truckers. I'm fascinated by the infrastructure that enables interactive: for example, cheaper storage that supports greater cloud utilization and mobile devices, which allow us to access the cloud from wherever we are at the moment.

A short list of other interests: responsive design, mobile and the adoption of tablets and smartphones across mass market, social commerce, and gamification.

Read anything good lately?

For fun, I just read the Maze Runner trilogy by James Dashner, a teen literature fix after my teenager got me to read The Hunger Games earlier this year. Futuristic, dark, and full of adventure and human race survival sort of stuff.

I also recently read The Idea Hunter by Boynton, Fischer, and Bole. The book was about being intellectually open and available to consider alternative options — both professionally and personally. Easy, quick read that I will come back to regularly.

For those who care about their professional future and/or the professional future of their children, I recommend The Coming Jobs War by Jim Clifton. I don’t agree with all of his assertions about cause and effect; however, I do agree with his overall assertion that good jobs drive the economic and psychological well-being of a nation.

How do you see Springbox moving forward in the next year?

Interactive marketing is constantly evolving — remember when email marketing was cutting edge? Our agency is structured in a way to respond quickly to new marketplace dynamics and trends. Clients seek us out as partners to intelligently and responsibly navigate this space in service of their marketing goals — we don’t simply plug holes or do technology for technology’s sake.

Without giving away the farm, there are three major interactive trends and forces underway that continue to come up in current client and prospective client engagements: 1) marrying physical and virtual 2) social audience and measurement and 3) organizational enablement on a global scale. We’re seeing high growth in social media, mobile and tablet experiences, digital experiences in retail environments, and building internal tools to help solve global brands’ internal challenges, and I think we’ll continue to do more and more of that work in 2012.

Everybody goes to SXSW to see The Next Big Thing. We go to interactive to discover the next Twitter. We go to music to hear the next Arcade Fire. We go to film to see the next Hurt Locker.

SXSW is two weeks we spend trying to look into the future, but my favorite two hours at SXSW 2011 were spent looking into the past.

30,000 years into the past.

Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a 3-D film that documents a rare look inside the Chauvet caves of Southern France — home to the oldest known cave paintings on Earth. I was lucky enough to catch the SXSW Film premiere. As a person who spends the majority of his time making marks to create meaning, it was impossible for me to take in those ancient paintings and not become emotional thinking about the way marks can last, the way they can travel through time and connect human beings.

Cut to one week ago. I was sitting in a bar with my friend Lee LeFever, the co-creator of Common Craft, a company that makes explanation videos “in plain English.” We were talking about the web and the common misconception that it is something ephemeral, something that is not permanent, something that doesn’t last. Lee told me that the most-watched, most-popular videos on the Common Craft site are videos that they posted in 2007. Videos about technology that are four years old, people still watch them and share them with friends, because the content is still strong and still valuable. As Rob Walker wrote in an article about the popular podcast Radiolab, “[sometimes] the value of a media product does not come from being fast. It comes from being timeless.”

“The most permanent medium is the digital one.” That’s something that Benjamin Palmer, CEO of The Barbarian Group, said in a recent interview. (When I think about the Chauvet caves, I’m reminded of the double meaning of “digital” expounded by cartoonist Lynda Barry: “This may be the digital age, but our hands are the original digital devices.”)

It’s easy in this industry to get caught up chasing after The Next Big Thing. Let’s not forget to also chase after The Thing That Lasts.