Last month, we told you about the importance of creating an in-house style guide to keep your brand, message, and any content you create consistent with your vision. This is important when hiring or contracting copy writers (or content creators) for your website, advertising efforts, or print collateral.

While keeping your in-house style guide up-to-date is important, it’s not always practical to include items outside of what directly applies to your branding efforts. For everything else, most web writers will follow standard style and usage guides, such as the AP Style guide or the Chicago Manual of Style (which is widely used for corporate communicators).

If you write the content for your website yourself, referencing a style guide can help you keep your website content clean and professional.

Now, however, there’s a new tool available: The Yahoo! Style Guide for writing, editing, and creating content for the digital world was just unveiled on Monday.

Unlike traditional guides that still place a focus on print writing, the Yahoo! Style Guide is specifically created for the web. It’s available now at http://styleguide.yahoo.com, and will also be available at your local bookstore early next month.

Write better, edit better, ask an Editor

Like other style and usage guides, the Yahoo! Style guide includes a comprehensive word list, which you can reference if you’re not sure how a certain word should be used or spelled (for example, Yahoo! suggests that your write the word “email” as a single word, without a hyphen). It also includes articles on how to improve your writing for the web, editing guidance, and even an Ask an Editor page where you can, well, ask an editor a question on style and usage.

So far, Yahoo! copy editors have been providing great responses to user questions:

Q: Is it ever OK to use colored text in a sentence for emphasis? I don’t like the look of italics, and I’ve heard that it’s hard to read onscreen

A: If you are the owner of the website, you may of course choose to color words to emphasize them. Doing so has one major drawback, however: People have been trained to regard colored words as links, so when they click the words and nothing happens, they may become frustrated and not click any links on the page, even the real ones.

One of the more useful features, especially if your building your own in-house style guide, is the ability to build your own word list. Download an XML, Microsoft Word, or Rich text format document, and then update it with your own usage notes that you can then provide to your web writers to follow.

So let us know what you think.  Is the Yahoo! Style guide something you find helpful?