Category Archives: Content

How to Find the Most Important Pages on Your Website

Posted on by

If you attended our Planning and Writing Web Content training you’ll recall we cover the topic of core pages during the day. These are the most important pages on your website.

We know that more than a few people struggled to identify these core pages on their own sites. Especially once they’d left the cosy confines of our training sessions, with one of our content officers on hand to help out…

It’s not an easy concept to master as many of our websites are split into sections that could arguably all be seen as important. But here’s a method you can easily follow:

Start with a purpose

Traditionally, websites were created at the University because there was a service, a school, institute, centre or whatever. Sites existed simply because they could – so they often didn’t start with a well-defined purpose.

No one stopped to ask ‘what are we trying to achieve with this website?’

The downside to this is if websites don’t have a defined purpose, then they can literally host ANYTHING. Sorry for shouting, but it’s true. Thousands of pages of unrelated content, hundreds of pictures, videos, power point presentations, blah blah blah – you name it, we’ve seen it.

It’s better to focus on your audience’s wants and needs.

So we have a specific undergraduate website, rather than a Marketing and Student Recruitment site with undergraduate content.

Create your site purpose

  1. List your website users/audiences. For example potential staff, media, international students, researchers.
  2. List the tasks your users come to your website to do. For example contact staff, apply for a course, check event times.
  3. Think about the business goals your website is supporting. For example, recruit staff, encourage collaboration, share news, advertise courses.

These lists are your new BFF and invaluable, they’ll form the basis of your site purpose statement.

Identifying your core pages

The next step is to identify those core pages that will support your site purpose.

Start with your list of user tasks and your list of business goals. Your core pages are those where these two elements meet – where your user can complete a task and you can convey your message.

For example, on a school site users often want to contact staff. One of our University-wide business goals is to enable collaboration, so our staff profile pages are core pages.

Another core page example would be a page about a CPD (or any) course. Users want to know what, where, when and the cost – we want them to apply, contact us, sign up – our business goals.

This exercise combined with data from analytics to show your most visited pages can help you identify your core pages quite easily.

Now you know…get going!

Set aside a few moments to make those lists, and use them to identify your core pages.

We can even help you plan content for these VIP pages. Download a core page template from our website. It’s straightforward and quickly helps you focus on what should/shouldn’t be there.

You can even use your core pages to prioritise what work to tackle next on your website.

Let your core pages help you decide what’s important and what’s not.

Once you know who you’re creating your website content for, and understand what they want to do/know – focus effort on these core pages and by default, you’ll create a better website.

Related posts

How to Use the Core Model to Improve Your Web Content

Share this post:
Share

Creating Effective Calls to Action

Posted on by

In our planning for the web training, we told you all about the core model; web pages that direct users to business goals or further information.

The paths through these pages can be highlighted as calls to action (CTA). Today, I’m going to talk about them in a little more detail.

Transactional vs navigational

There are two types of CTA, transactional and navigational.

Transactional CTA achieve business goals by getting your users to:

  • buy
  • order
  • book
  • enquire
  • pay
  • apply

Navigational CTA provide users with forward paths by linking to further information or a logical ‘next step’ in the user journey.

When you need to button it

Navigational CTA generally only need a hyperlink within the text. For example, ‘visit our Postgraduate website to find out more about funding opportunities’.

Transactional CTA require something with more impact. That’s where the T4 content type 08. Button comes in.

Buttons are larger and more eye-catching than hyperlinks. The text on them should be active, and encourage the user to do something like ‘buy now’ or ‘sign up’.

There’s examples of CTA buttons on our Go Mobile Demo website.

Storytelling

Think of your web page as a story, with the call to action as the epic climax. The narrative or your page (ie the rest of the content) should build anticipation for the call to action.

You should tell your users:

  • what the page is about
  • what the problem/issue/benefit is
  • a little of what the user will get out of pressing your button

Get it right

You can find out about different types of CTA, what types of pages to use them on, and even our top tips for using buttons.

Share this post:
Share

Check Your Spelling and Grammar as You Type

Posted on by

Content evaluation tools, like Siteimprove, help you to fix problems like misspellings on your live website. But what about catching the mistakes before they’re made public?

For the past month or so I’ve been testing a browser-based spelling and grammar checker that highlights any issues as you type. It’s called Grammarly. You might have seen one of their ads as you’ve waited for a video to play on YouTube?

Add the browser extension to Chrome and you’re ready to go.

The extension works in most browser-based text editors, from webmail to social media and of course, T4. As you type you’ll see errors highlighted in red. When you hover over them an explanation of why they’ve been picked up is given along with suggested corrections. Just like the spellchecker in Word, you can review the identified errors and choose to accept or ignore them.

Screenshot of Grammarly spelling correction in T4

You can choose to sign up for a free account (although it’s not necessary) to get access to additional features:

  • choose British English rules for spelling, punctuation, and grammar
  • add words to your personal dictionary
  • write directly in Grammarly or upload documents for checking

It’s not perfect, and I’d advise you to read the explanations and use your judgment as to whether you accept them or not. It’s also not a substitute for proofreading your content before it’s published, but it’s a pretty good tool to help you take a step towards minimising spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.

Share this post:
Share

A Quick Guide to… Heading Styles

Posted on by

There are several different headings available in T4. The style of these headings (font, size, colour) is part of our branded University web template. To comply with accessibility guidelines and the University style guide, they should always be used in a certain order.

Let’s take a look…

Page titles and introductions

Every page on your website should have a title and an introduction. Both should be added using the 01. Page Title and Intro content type, and should look like this:

page-title-intro

An example from the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics website.

In the case of masthead pages, the title and introduction are contained within the masthead image. Here’s an example on the Electron Microscopy Research Services site.

On tabbed pages, a page title should be added as usual, but introductions should be included on each individual tab. Here’s an example on the School of Modern Languages site.

General purpose content

There are different heading styles available in the 01. General Purpose Content content type. Across University websites each of the headings are the same size and font, but the colours will vary depending on the design of your website.

Heading 2 is the first sub-heading on a page. If you want to introduce a new topic you will need to add a new Heading 2 by adding a new piece of general purpose content.

Heading 3 is the first sub-heading following Heading 2. You would use Heading 3 to introduce information related to Heading 2, but that contains enough content to form a sub section of information. Then Heading 4 is used as a sub-heading following Heading 3 and so on.

This creates a clear hierarchy of information both to users and search engines.

Headings in general purpose content will look something like this:

heading-styles

Heading styles in general purpose content.

You can use the same heading style multiple times on the same page. Use them to organise information in a clear, sensible way eg the first Heading 2 on the below page is followed by two Heading 3s:

headings

Example of a page using multiple headings to organise information

Headings should never be used as links. If you want to add an impactful link, use a Call to Action (CTA) button (the 08. Button content type).

Tabbed content

Titles in tabs are Heading 2. This means that all headings underneath them should be Heading 3 or smaller. Like this:

headers-tabs

Headings on a tabbed page.

Expandable content

The title text on expandable content defaults to Heading 3. It looks like this:

expandable-box

An expandable box using Heading 3.

If you use a piece of expandable content under a Heading 3, you should change it’s title to Heading 4. Like this:

expandable-heading4

An example from the International Preparation Courses website.

Related posts

For advice about writing good titles and introductions, see our quick guides on headings and introductions, and our tips for improving introductions and page titles.

Share this post:
Share

Top Five Takeaways From Agile Content Conference

Posted on by

At the end of January, I attended the Agile Content Conference in London. With the overall theme of collaboration, I was excited to pick up some practical tips to improve our work with colleagues in schools and services. Here are my top five takeaways from the day of case studies and workshops.

Embed content professionals within product/service teams

Erica Hoerl talked about her time working as a lone content strategist in the Messenger product team at Facebook. Emphasising the importance of having a voice for content at every stage of the product’s development, rather than drafting someone in for a specific content phase.

I’ve experienced the latter situation a lot. When the content team sits externally to a product or service team, we’re often brought in after the important decisions have been made. Embedding a content professional as a member of the team from the outset helps to get content seen as not just an add-on but a crucial part of any development.

Learn together

Jonathan Kahn introduced the conference with a series of collaboration tips to help find a solution that works for everyone:

  • talk to a range of people, not just those you’ve worked with before
  • align goals before identifying user needs
  • reframe objections as opportunities
  • learn together

They key to this, I think, is learning together; involving all stakeholders in user research and content design. This is supported by something Jo Wolfe asked us – to challenge ourselves to leave our preconceptions behind when starting a project. I think too often we start a project with a solution before really understanding the problem we’re trying to fix.

Pair writing workshop

Proof I was there – taking part in a pair writing activity

Mental models help create empathy

In its simplest definition, a person’s mental model is the way they look at the world. It’s based on beliefs or assumptions about how things should work. Mental models are built up over time through experience. They are unique to an individual and change over time, as we gain more experience of different situations.

We can gain an insight into someone’s mental model through user research. This allows us to understand their motivations and concerns. It helps to create empathy and in turn, allows us to design content that meets their needs.

Use principles to drive content creation

Lauren Pope and Sarah Jones from Brilliant Noise shared a case study from their work with American Express to streamline content creation and reuse through an editorial hub. They aligned the work of multinational content production teams through a clearly defined purpose and set of principles.

The principle that stands out to me is this:

“Only AmEx can do this.”

It’s a bold statement about the importance of producing unique content. Something that I’m painfully aware of in the HE sector is the number of university websites that are just carbon copies of each other. Whenever we create new content for our sites we need to ask “what makes us unique?” and use that to tell a story.

Solve fewer problems better

This nugget of wisdom comes from Alex Watson, a product manager for BBC News. It’s pretty clear what it means, and I’m sure most of us would be likely to dismiss it as a given. And perhaps that’s the problem. We can get so swept along on a treadmill of things we need to get done, that sometimes we lose quality in the work we’re doing. I’m going to make a commitment to myself to do fewer things better. Will you join me?

Image credit: Paul Clarke on Flickr.

Share this post:
Share