Category Archives: Content

Big and (now) Beautiful

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The Careers website is a vitally important part of the University’s web presence, and we’ve just finished a huge, six month long Go Mobile redevelopment.

Careers website homepage

New home page

It’s a big University service with multiple audiences, including:

  • prospective and current students
  • parents
  • old and new graduates
  • our academics and staff
  • employers

And these users have any number of different tasks they want to complete. From checking opening times, finding out about Recruitment Fairs or CV workshops, psychometric tests, researching occupations, and advertising jobs….

When one becomes four

The site was so big it’s now four separate websites. Why? Because like it or not, big isn’t normally beautiful on the web.

‘Big’ often means content has simply grown over the years, with more information added, and added…..and added. Simultaneously, moving or navigating around a big site is generally harder too. (And yes you’ve guessed, it’s even harder to navigate on a smaller mobile screen.)

If not diligently reviewed, big websites often suffer with duplicated or out of date information. More pages are added, so more navigation is needed. It’s a vicious circle.
But by the very nature of this information-led service, the Careers website had to hold a massive amount of content.

OK, but surely the most popular pages were easy to find? Well…no. it was big you see, so really hard to find some good stuff.

Alright, but it looked like it was part of the University right? …Oh dear.

The return of the 1980s

It’s fair to say the old Careers Service website was looking a bit….well, 1980s. And nothing like the rest of the University online. It was seriously overdue for a redevelopment!

Old careers homepage

Old home page

Because the site used an old template, they were also cursed with some of the longest webpages ever seen on planet earth. I kid you not.

This one example had a word count of 1,607. That’s FIVE A4 pages worth of content on one webpage.

Before:

Screenshot of old careers page which was very long

Old CV page

After:

Screenshot of new careers page which is much shorter

New CV page

While some pages are still quite long, the content is easier to scan read and navigate around using mobile.

So our Go Mobile project actually involved a major information architecture evaluation and wholescale restructuring, audience identification, and four separate website rebuilds.

Followed by extensive re-writing, editing, layout and format changes.

Oh, and then we made it responsive for mobile.

Now we have four new websites. Our external sites now boast tailored, audience specific content and fully responsive templates:

And information for Staff? Well that’s now an internal website of course (login required).

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The Content Audit: Step 1 for Improving Your Website

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The Go Mobile process begins with a content audit. I’m here to share with you what that involves and how it informs everything that follows.

The audit process

We start by taking an inventory of all the pages on a site. One of our web content officers systematically goes through it to collect information for each page, such as:

  • the page title
  • its level in the site structure
  • when it was last updated
  • its overall content quality (measured against our content standards)
  • whether there’s any content embedded or being fed in from elsewhere
  • whether it’s linked from the menu
  • if it links to any documents

We make an assessment of each page and recommend whether it should be retained, improved or deleted.

For pages marked for improvement we’ll also provide some context, or a recommendation for how the page could be built using the new content types.

The resulting spreadsheet is a riot of colour…

Example content audit spreadsheet

Acting on the audit

When the audit is finished, the auditor sits down with the project manager to go through the findings.

The project manager uses the outcome of the audit to work with the site’s owners and editors to agree the next steps.

The information gathered in the audit helps us to:

  • restructure sites
  • inform work needed before migration into T4
  • identify where we can improve content

The audit also provides a snapshot of the size and complexity of a site at a specific point. Having this information gives us a benchmark we can compare the new site to after it’s been through Go Mobile.

How you can help

Editors of websites due to go through the Go Mobile process can help us out with a bit of spring cleaning.

For tips, read Lisa’s post ‘Decluttering Your Website: How to Prepare for Go Mobile’

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A Quick Guide to… Introductions

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The latest in our series of Quick Guides, here’s a reminder of best practice for:

Introductions

We have a simple three point guideline for writing introductions for the web. Introductions should:

  • have fewer than 50 words
  • be a summary of the page’s main point
  • include keywords to support search engine optimisation

We’ve recently been talking about reducing the word limit even further. Could you explain what a page is for in 30 words?

Consider it from the point of view of different devices – whereas a 50 word intro can look roomy on a huge desktop screen, it suddenly becomes very cosy when seen on a mobile.

Keep it simple, and keep it to the point. There’s nothing more annoying than having to read halfway down a page to find out that you’ve been looking at irrelevant content.

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How Compression Can Increase User Satisfaction

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Linking to documents that provide more information is vital for responsive design websites.

Let’s face it – no-one wants to read all your content for a specific topic on a single web page, or an endless number of web pages, on a mobile screen.

Having a 70-page research report or the terms and conditions of applying for a job as a downloadable PDF is sensible.

But what happens if that document is 15MB in size? First of all, you won’t get it in the university’s new content management system – it has an 8MB limit.

Even then, someone downloading 8MB on a 3G phone is going to be waiting a while to see it. They’ll also be eating into their data allowance at an alarming rate if they have a few of these to download.

Smaller is better

Making the file size of your documents smaller is key to improving your users’ experiences.

Compression can reduce the time documents need to load and cut the cost for those using mobile data.

Not everyone has access to Adobe Acrobat and its PDF resizing capabilities due to the cost. But there are free tools online to solve this issue; one of the best I’ve found is Smallpdf.

You can drag and drop your document from your computer onto its Compress PDF screen and it’ll do the rest. Then simply download the result for your website.

I’ve seen it take documents of 17MB and reduce them to 600KB, a much more palatable size for users. And there’s no loss of quality.

Even if you think your document is small enough not to bother with this, do it anyway. Every little helps with page loading speed and aiding user experience.

Smallpdf also provides many other PDF manipulation services that could prove helpful to you.

Make it easier for your users to access your documents and there’s every chance they will.

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A Quick Guide to… Lists

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To help you keep track of the standards we use online – welcome to our quick guide to:

Lists

We like the use of lists online, they help you to break up large blocks of text on pages, by introducing white space. They also make your content instantly easy to understand, as they are quicker to scan read.

You can choose between bulleted and numbered lists. Here are the rules for each type of list.

Bulleted Lists

For most pages we’d recommend using bulleted lists. Make sure that you:

  • follow on from a colon
  • start each point with a lowercase letter
  • don’t add punctuation at the end of a bullet point (or at the end of the list)
  • use a minimum of three bullets but no more than six
  • begin with keywords and use bold for emphasis
  • keep each point short (not full sentences) – aim for up to 10 words

Numbered Lists

Numbered lists are recommended to use only when you want to guide a user through steps or a ‘top 5’.

  1. They don’t need to follow from a colon.
  2. Start each step with a capital letter.
  3. End each step with a full stop – each step should be a complete sentence.

Next time we’ll be covering introductions.

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