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Meet the Supporting Cast for your Core Content

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Me: “Hey website, I have a question, help me answer it. How do I get to Newcastle?”

Website: “Before I do that, why not stay a while, look at our pictures; see how they glide by. We’re showcasing our city, our campus, our staff, our facilities, and our cat (oh, you didn’t stick around for that one).”

Me (scrolling quickly): “No really, just directions would do…”

Website: “Could I interest you in this video – it’s actually about the Law School, but you know, it might have a map in it, or perhaps a Virtual Tour? We’ve got a nice one of the Sports Centre: the gym is amazing”.

Me: “Er, no thanks, bye.”

Meet your supporting cast

These image galleries, videos and virtual tours have a lot to bring to your web pages.

They can provide engaging content. They help reinforce reputation and quality. They should act as support for the core content of the page.

Problems occur when they take over and try to be the star of the show.

They interrupt the flow of your carefully crafted content. They butt in. They push the priority messages out of the way.

 “Most people come to the Web because there’s an information gap. Something has cropped up. There’s something they don’t know, something they need to do.”

Gerry McGovern

Prioritise web page content

We should be careful about placing too much emphasis on the supporting content in a page.

Stop this from happening by focusing on the priorities for the page.  Read our blog post on Structuring Content to help you.

All our supporting content flows after the core content. On desktop it floats right or under the core message. On mobile it flows under the core messages.

This means our site users are not interrupted when trying to find the answer to their questions. The supporting content is there if they have time or want to read more, watch or listen.

 “Let us not focus on getting people to spend time with our content but rather on seeing how we can save them time.”

Gerry McGovern

Supporting content examples

Supporting web content includes a whole raft of things from images to interactive virtual tours. As long as it’s relevant to the page and its placement is considered: it’s all good.

Qualifiers

Qualifiers back up our claims. They could be quotes or accolades that reinforce a core message. Partner logos and accreditation can also lend weight to statements within the content.

Images

A picture is worth a thousand words – this can be true. A good, clear, relevant photo can enhance your core content.

But, too many images can start to bring noise and distraction to the page. Consider displaying these as an image gallery. This can group together similar photography: facilities for example.

Video

Add a video if it supports the content of the page – don’t get sucked into adding videos “just because they were made”. This all represents clutter to your end user.

Virtual tours

These are a great way to showcase facilities and can help engage with your users. Again, make sure they support the context of the page.

Calls to action

Supporting content can also provide a next step.

They include calls to action like booking a place at an event. We have styled content buttons for this.

We’ve also got a suite of social media icons that can help increase visits to Facebook or Twitter.

Delete it!

Test if it really is supporting content. If you took it away would your reader still leave the page happy that they found out what they needed?

References

Gerry McGovern. The Challenge for Writers of Web Content. New Thinking. 24 May 2015.

Related posts

Image credit: magic moment by rvoegtli on Flickr

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Training our Editors to Think Digital First

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Our Go Mobile programme is the driver for some brand new training to get the University thinking digital first.

Raising the bar

We’re training our web editors to operate the new content management system – T4.

We’ve also invited key site owners to come and learn about managing a site. This includes setting goals for content and best practice in writing for the web.

The first sessions ran on 7 and 8 May for trainees from the:

  • Undergraduate and Postgraduate marketing teams
  • Research Office
  • Institute for Sustainability
  • School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development

Day 1: Writing and Planning Web Content

We want to get our web editors really thinking about their content.

The University doesn’t want a team of content-putter-uppers. It needs digitally savvy writers who understand what their site is for and how to evaluate it.

Day 1 introduces setting a site purpose and how you prioritise content to support it. It was good to be able to try out some exercises we’d picked up at Confab Europe (a content strategy conference).  Even better, our editors seemed to really understand them and could see how they might use them.

“[The] site purpose planning doc was super helpful!”

The session also covers tips for writing web content and introduce a range of tools to help you do this.

“The writing tips I know, but still find hard to put into practice…it was a useful refresher.”

Day 2: T4 Training

Our T4 training day provides an introduction to the Content Management System. It showcases the idea of responsive design and how we’re configuring T4 to support editors to write for a range of devices.

“Having news and staff lists in one place is fantastic.”

Empowering editors

Site editors can more easily influence the design of their content in T4. The first editors are starting a 2-4 week period of supported editing. In this time they’ll get to apply new layouts, add quality assets, and improve their content for reading online.

It’s a chance to cut words, tighten copy and focus on users.

Initial feedback

As we go, we’re gathering feedback on the training topics, the delivery and the new CMS. We’re in Beta mode at the moment – but hope we’ve got a good starting point. We’ll be improving the training content as we go.

Accessing training

Training is only available to site editors as part of the Go Mobile Programme: we’ll be in touch when it’s your turn!

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How to Get to the Top of Search Results

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When you use a search engine or the University’s on-site search (powered by Google), how often do you look at the second or third page of search results? Never, right? You usually follow links that appear high up in the results.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is how you go about improving your website’s position in search results. The good news is you can do something about it right now. It’s not a technical fix and money doesn’t buy you the top spot…

Text on graphic featuring the letters SEO

It’s all about your web content.

So far, so good. But what is it that you need to do?

Write search engine optimised content

Your primary focus is writing for your user not for a search engine: if you get this right then your SEO will follow.

Use the language of your reader

Think about what terms a user might use to search for your site. Use these words in your content.

Explain acronyms or industry jargon – a new member of staff is unlikely to know that we refer to ourselves as CWD (Corporate Web Development). We’d always make sure to spell out our name or refer more conversationally to ourselves as the Web Team (as that’s how we’re known).

Identify keywords and phrases that you want to rank highly for in search results. Keep the focus narrow — competing against general terms like ‘student experience’ is unrealistic.

You can use Google analytics to find out what search terms people are using to find your site. Contact us to get access to your web analytics dashboard (University login required).

Update content regularly

When a page was last updated matters to your users and search engines. It is important that you check for, and edit or delete, out-dated content.

Our post on writing for the web gives you some further hints on how to improve your copy.

Highlight important content

Make sure the search engine can easily work out which content is most important.

You can do this by including keywords in headings (particularly your page title), making them bold and using them in hyperlink text. This means no ‘click here’ link text – unless of course you want to be top of Google for that!

All these elements get marked up in the HTML so are immediately noticeable when your site gets crawled by a search engine.

Site and page structure

Web addresses also known as Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) get displayed in search results.

They can help your readers to decide whether to visit your site by indicating what the page is about. Descriptive URLs with words that are relevant to your site’s content mean more to your site visitors and search engines.

Links

Links into your site from related external websites act as verification of your content’s relevance and importance. Look for opportunities for collaborators and partners to link back to your site.

This also works across Newcastle University’s site. Make sure you link to other related content and get your colleagues to return the favour. Search engines respond to well-linked sites.

Graphics and images

Try not to rely too heavily on graphics or text in images to convey your message. Search engines can’t get at this copy – so your content doesn’t get indexed. Worse, they don’t get found by your customers.

They cause problems for accessibility too: don’t exclude your potential customers by making content difficult to engage with.

Have a go

Try a search on the University website for terms you think should find a page on your site. Make a note of where you appear in the results (eg page 5, postion 3).

Go to your website and optimise your content (use headings and bold), increase hyperlinks to the page that needs greater visibility, improve the URLs.

Give it a few days for the search to update and see how you’ve improved your search results!

Image credit: How to Search Engine Optimization by SEO Planter via photopin under CC BY-ND 2.0.

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Team Update: 17 – 31 March

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Welcome to our first ever Team Update.

We’ll be publishing updates every two weeks to showcase what we’ve been working on and what’s coming up.

Go Mobile programme

We set ourselves a deadline of Easter for a number of things related to Go Mobile on the basis that it was far enough away not to worry about it. Well, here we are, almost at Easter: what have we done?

There’s been a lot of liaison with the editors and owners of sites going through the Go Mobile programme. Sites coming up include: Postgraduate, Undergraduate, Press Office, Research, Institute for Sustainability, Institute for Ageing, and the Law School.

Technical developments

As we move towards applying the new responsive design to sites migrating into the T4 Content Management System, there’s been some tech set up needed. The server now supports the new template – all the stylesheets, fonts and JavaScript that run the content design are functioning.

Postgraduate components

The tech team (Andy, Catherine, Peter and Paul) have been importing the Postgraduate responsive template HTML into T4 and have broken it down into reusable components. These will form the building blocks for all the other sites going through Go Mobile.

Catherine has also been working on some new things such as making the image galleries and staff lists responsive.

site Migration planning

We’ve now got some resilient migration scripts meaning we can port over sites from where they live now (unix accounts) into T4. We tested this out last week on a small scale example website and everything seems fine.

It’s not all automated unfortunately, we have to prepare sites for migration by tagging them up in a pre-migration template. There’s also some fixing needed in the CMS once the site is in there.

The project leads in the web team have been working on tagging up sites ready for migration. Emma C and Lisa also audited each site’s content, reviewing site depth, structure and content quality.

Undergraduate site migration

The undergraduate site already uses T4 – but doesn’t use our new content components. We’ve been working with the Undergraduate team and NUIT to map out the specifics of moving this website into a responsive design (it involves a horrible spreadsheet of about 8000 cells).

Training and support

There’s a lot of development going on around our new Go Mobile training package. We’ve pulled together sessions to support our web editors in all aspects of website management:

  • Anne is developing training in the T4 CMS
  • Emma C and Linda have developed training to help you manage your site: planning content, setting site purpose and measuring success
  • Jane and Lisa created the writing for the web part of the training including top tips on structuring content, cutting out the waffle and optimising for search

We’ve also:

  • received 34 support requests through the NUService Helpdesk and have resolved 18 of them
  • trained eight web editors in the use of Contribute to manage their websites

Campaigns and web developments

There’s still a lot of business as usual!

  • Jane has been working with the Postgraduate team to set up and run external user testing, run content clarity tests, and review website changes following the results of earlier user testing
  • Emma C and Lisa have written a usability report for user testing carried out on the new responsive design: Lisa has written a summary of our key findings for the blog
  • Steve has developed some research pages on the internal Sage Faculty website
  • Steve has developed some content on The School of Biology’s Ecology and Conservation Research Group
  • We’re investigating brokering support from external suppliers for three project websites
  • There have been various content updates to Newcastle University London
  • We’re planning changes to our Engagement and International websites
  • Pete has been exploring the use of the Google Tag Manager to improve access to Google Analytics tracking code. This should make things easier in the future as it reduces the need to wrangle with HTML

Plans for the next few weeks include:

  • Testing out our new Go Mobile training on the rest of the Web Team (wish us luck – they’re a tough crowd)
  • Migrating the first batch of sites into T4 – Press Office, Institute for Sustainability, Law School and Research – we’ll see you on the other side!
  • Coming up with some further layout/design options for sites in Go Mobile
  • Moving internal-facing content and sites to internal.ncl.ac.uk

See you next time!

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Top 5 Tips: Writing for the Web

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Screenshot of Prezi - writing for the web

We often get asked about writing for the web as if it’s some mysterious dark art. It’s really not, it’s very simple.

We’ve pulled together our top 5 tips for improving web content.

View our Prezi to find out more: Top 5 tips: writing for the web.

Here’s a summary of what you’ll find there:

1. Be concise

It takes time to edit content and cut words – but it’s worth it – your users are more likely to read what you say.

Tip: try the Hemingway Editor to help you cut your copy and increase readability.

2. Be direct

Use clear, jargon-free language to get your point across to your readers.

3. Make your copy scannable

Use sub-headings, bullet points, lists and bold – all of these things help to get your content noticed.

4. Be conversational

It’s fine to be less formal on the web. Just imagine you’re having a cuppa with your reader and type as you’d talk!

5. Be active

Use hyperlinks to encourage people to read more of your site. Point out content that should interest them – what’s the next step you want them to take?

Feel free to get in touch via the comments – we’d love to hear your thoughts.

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