Category Archives: Content

A Quick Guide to…Dates and Times

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We’ve standardised how we write dates and times on our sites. This makes it easier for visitors to work out when things are happening.

It also makes scanning a page for key information much quicker.

In the latest of our Quick Guide series, here’s a timely reminder of our best practice for dates and times:

Dates

Dates have no punctuation.

The order should be day month year eg Thursday 4 August 2016.

A date range should look like this:

  • 2011 to 2012
  • Friday 28 February to Monday 3 March

Sometimes space is an issue, eg in tables. In this case, it’s fine to use truncated months eg Jan, Feb, Mar.

We’ve also set standards for writing decades and centuries:

  • 1930s not 1930’s
  • 20th century not twentieth century

Times

We use the 24 hour clock.

This makes times accessible to international audiences.

Here are some principles for presenting times:

  • 17.30 not 5:30pm or 1730hrs
  • 00.00 not midnight
  • 12.00 not midday or 12 noon

For periods of time, you can use a hyphen between start and end times. For example, 10.00 – 11.30

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Best practice example: grid boxes

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We’re often asked for examples of really good websites. The thing is, each site is different, depending on the type of site, their users, and their needs. Websites constantly evolve due to changing user needs, business goals or time-sensitive messaging.

So there’s not really one static best practice example that ticks all the boxes for everyone.

What we can do is point you in the direction of really good content usage to take inspiration from.

Each batch we put through the go live process has examples of excellent content. In this new series of blog posts, we’ll use these to highlight best practice examples.

Here’s a couple of examples of best practice for grid boxes from recent Go Mobile batches.

Grid boxes

Grid boxes are used for homepages and section openers. These are pages that give an introduction for a particular section (eg Research, Study with Us, About Us).

They help create visual hierarchy, so users can easily see where they are in your site. Because of this, they should only be used for top level sections of your site (the pages that appear in the side menu when you’re on the homepage).

boxes on the Study with Us section of the Malaysia campus website

Newcastle University Medicine Malaysia Study With Us section

This example is from Newcastle University Medicine Malaysia. It uses our ‘top task box – dark’ content piece.

This is basically four links, but presented in a visual, structured way. Visitors can immediately see what’s on offer. This is a good option when you want to give a quick overview of different services, for example.

For this Study with Us section, it was important that we had clear pathways signposted for four key groups of users: undergraduates, postgraduates, international students, and parents.

We wanted each group to feel catered for, supported, and have easy access to pages that would help them.

You can have some text above grid boxes. Keep it short, and don’t add any if it’s not needed. The boxes should take centre stage, and do a quick job of moving users on to core pages.

boxes on the Study with Us section of the Mechanical Engineering website

Mechanical Engineering Study With Us section

This example is from the School of Mechanical and Systems Engineering. It uses our ‘top task box – light’ content piece.

This box type gives you the option to include some hyperlinks (max. 4) below the image and main link. It’s a good option for pages where you know there are several core pages that you want to highlight.

In this example, we wanted to signpost prospective students towards the undergraduate pages, but knew that they’re likely to want to know about courses and funding in particular.

Light top task boxes are great for larger sections where you want to direct users explicitly to core pages.

Think about what the key messages for the section are, and what your user is looking for. Work out what are core areas (give them boxes), key pages within these areas (give them links), and what is additional information (don’t link them from your section opener).

Your additional information pages (in this case, the Careers page) will always be available within the section via the menu.

Learn more

You’ll learn how to create and manage these pages in our T4 training sessions. And you’ll find out how to identify your core pages in our training on planning web content.

If you’re stuck, we can help you work out what format will work best for your navigational pages, and help you with setting up grid layouts.

Have a look at :

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Writing in the Active Voice

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The last of our top five tips for writing for the web is to ‘be active’. This encompasses including calls to action and links, but perhaps most importantly, using the active voice.

The difference between the passive and active voice, and how you change one to the other is often something that we get asked about in training. So here’s a short blog post to help.

Active vs passive

To know the difference between the active and passive voice you need to identify the subject and the object of a sentence. Here’s an example of an active sentence:

Andrew edits web content.

In this sentence Andrew is the subject – he is active. Because there is an action the sentence also contains a verb – to edit. And the web content is the object – it is acted upon.

The passive form of this sentence would read:

Web content is edited by Andrew.

Andrew is still the subject and web content is the object, but now the passive object holds the focus of the sentence.

Benefits of using the active voice

The passive voice isn’t wrong, but it’s often a poor way to communicate your message. If you think it causes confusion for you as the author of content, imagine what it’s like for your audience. Using the active voice can make your content clearer, more direct and more engaging.

If you’re using Hemingway to check the readability of your content it will identify passive voice for you – watch out for the green highlights. You’ll see that it doesn’t ask you to remove all examples of passive voice from your writing. But it does give you a target (based on the length of your content) to aim for.

It’s ok to use passive voice when you intend to force the object into focus, for example:

Professor Chris Day has been appointed as the next Vice-Chancellor of Newcastle University.

 

How to move from passive to active

The easiest way to change a sentence from passive to active is to turn it on its head. Put the subject of the sentence – the one doing the action – before the verb. Once you’ve done this you can rewrite the sentence to maintain its original meaning.

Related reading

Top five tips: writing for the web

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Improving Readability through Go Mobile

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We measure the success of the Go Mobile programme by looking at the readability score for our content.

Why readability is important

It’s important to us as our websites help us communicate with a broad range of users. Everyone from school leavers to top researchers visit our sites. They all have different content needs. They all want to find answers to questions. We need to provide answers clearly and directly. This is where readability comes in.

You can find out more in our blog posts about readability and simplifying language.

Benchmarking our readability

We use a browser-based tool called Clarity Grader to give us a clear language score for a website. They look like this (red indicates a bad score, amber is fair and green is good):

This shows a Clarity Grader report with a bad score for long sentences, a fair result foraverage sentence length and readability, and a good score on passive language.

To work out the scoring of a site, Clarity Grader assesses the following:

Long sentences

A long sentence has more than 20 words. Using short sentences helps you to keep them simple in structure. It means it’s easier to get your message across. It also makes them simpler to read on a mobile screen.

Clarity Grader recommends having no more than 5% of your content in long sentences.

Average sentence length

Clarity Grader recommends an average sentence length of 10 words or lower across the site. Obtaining this average will mean that your content is clearer and easier to understand.

Passive language

You should be aiming for direct language. The Clarity Grader report considers a score of 4% or lower to be a good indicator of active messages.

Readability

A score of 60 or higher indicates your message is clear. It means users of your site will understand your meaning with ease.

Access to Clarity Grader

Our subscription means that we can’t make Clarity Grader available to all editors. If you think it’d be useful to you, get in touch and we’ll see what reports we can run for you.

You can get readability scores on a page by page basis by using the Hemingway app.

University readability – before and after Go Mobile

We’re running Clarity Grader reports before and after a site goes through Go Mobile. This has given us a useful benchmark to look at the readability of University web content.

Our School of Mechanical and Systems Engineering has improved the readability of their content. They’ve reduced the length of sentences and made their content more active.

Before

mech-eng-before

After

mech-eng-after

 

Setting a readability score for the University

We’ve shown that Go Mobile is improving the content quality across the site. I think the Clarity Grader scores are a little strict for us right now.

I propose a set of targets to get us nearer to where we should be. Unfortunately we’ll not get the lovely all green for good from Clarity Grader. But it’s a start.

I suggest:

  • Long sentences: 15%
  • Sentence length: 10 or lower
  • Passive language: 4% or lower
  • Readability: 45 or higher

Let me know in the comments if you agree with the targets.

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Quality as Standard: Our Proofreading Checklist

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Every site we build goes through rigorous technical and quality checks before being released into the wild. I’m involved in the quality side as part of the editorial team who are responsible for proofreading the content.

There’s a simple reason for all the checks we do prior to making a site live: visitors to your site will judge you for the mistakes they find. And that judgement could be the difference between recruiting a student or attracting a new member of staff/partner/funder, or not.

Here’s our checklist of things to look out for.

Spelling and grammar

First on the list is a check to make sure there are no typos or spelling mistakes – we get help with this from SiteImprove.

We’ll also check the grammar. A misplaced comma can make a massive difference to the meaning of a sentence.

Clarity and consistency

We’ll check to make sure content is as clear as possible. Sentences and paragraphs should be short. Content should be direct and helpful – if you’re inclined to ramble, beware.

We’re looking for use of plain English. We’ll remove jargon, caveats and unnecessary words.

We’re also looking out for cases of repetition – within the page and across the site.

Currency and accuracy

Part of the proof is to make sure content is current and accurate. When we’re migrating sites we begin with a snapshot of content, and this can often go out of date during the development phase. The most common instance is where deadlines have passed.

Content and editorial standards

We have a set of content and editorial standards that help us maintain consistency across the University website. You can get a flavour of these standards through our quick guides series. Part of our proofreading is to make sure content meets these standards.

Sense check

We always make sure that someone who hasn’t worked on the content before takes on the role of proof reader. This fresh pair of eyes is more likely to spot anything that doesn’t make sense and might confuse the user.

Give it a go

Why not use our proofing checklist to make sure anything you publish on your site meets the web team’s standards. We’ve produced a content quality checklist (PDF: 74KB) to help with this.

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