Breaking Bad When It Comes to Links

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Broken links are the bane of user experience.

There’s nothing worse than finding a 404 error page. And people who tart 404s up with quaint local dialect or jokes to apologise should just stop.

If you remove a page or change a url and leave the old link lingering elsewhere, you’re breaking trust.

You’re damaging the confidence people have that your website is up-to-date. You’re frustrating them with the promise of information you’ve snatched away.

Search engines won’t like you either. You are breaking their trust in sending people to your website.

Identifying broken links

You might say it’s unavoidable to have broken links. It’s not, it just requires care. If you’re killing a page, document or changing a url remember where you’ve placed links and change or remove them. This could be on your website, social media or even in print.

If you can’t remember where website links were, use these services to find them:

Make search engines work for you

What happens if search engines have indexed the page/document you removed?

They make it difficult enough to get up the search rankings without causing this kind of headache.

If you can’t redirect people elsewhere, it’s time to make Google and co work for you.

Do a search for the page/document you’ve just deleted and if you find it in their listings – report it.

Google (if you have an account) will remove dead links from search listings on request. Make them work for you.

Further reading

A Link is a Promise, Kara Pernice, NNg

A Quick Guide to… Headings

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Pssst….Unlike some of my team, I don’t have perfect recollection of the character length a heading should be. So I’ll put it ‘out there’….. I have to look this stuff up just as much as anyone!

To help you/me keep track of this stuff, let me introduce a new series of short posts about our writing standards.

So fasten those seat belts – fingers on the print button, this is a quick guide to:

Headings

Included in the standards for headings are page titles and sub-headings, so I’ll cover each one here.

Page Titles

Page titles, are the first thing visitors to your site see and tell them what each page is about. They can also be seen out of context, eg in a search results page.

Your page titles need to be clear and meaningful so a user knows whether the information they want is on your page. They should:

  • be short so they are easier to read – less than 50 characters (including spaces)
  • use title case eg Student Life not Student life
  • begin with keywords to support scan reading
  • be simple and clear; jargon is difficult to understand and makes pages hard to find

Sub-headings

Sub-headings help to break up content on your page. They make text easier to scan read and help your users pick out relevant information easily. They should:

  • be short and meaningful – less than 30 characters (including spaces)
  • use sentence case eg Student life in Newcastle
  • begin with keywords to support scan reading

Next time we’ll be covering lists.

Team update: 29 February – 11 March 2016

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Today is moving day! See you on the other side.

Go Mobile programme

Ongoing induction planning and planning for the programme overall.

Work on the alumni site is progressing well. There’s some development work needed on the fund areas with impact and some technical work needed to manage donations and events.

The Careers website has been migrated into T4. Jane and Lisa are carrying out post-migration work on the site to get it ready to hand over to editors next week.

Campaigns and other developments

The University is looking for a new Vice-Chancellor, in succession to Professor Chris Brink who retires in December 2016. We’ve been working with Corporate Affairs and Human Resources to develop a micro-site to promote this opportunity.

We’ve provided a bit of support to set up some online events pages for the HaSS Faculty.

Training and support

Over the next couple of weeks we’re delivering more Go Mobile Training sessions plus additional induction sessions for new team members.

Plans for the next few weeks

We’ll be settling into our new home in the Daysh Building – you can find us in room G11 previously used by Combined Honours. Why not pop in and say hello if you’re passing?

We’re still part of Corporate Affairs Directorate and can be contacted in the usual ways: email webmaster@ncl.ac.uk, via the IT ServiceDesk or by phone. Post should still be sent to King’s Gate Level 5.

The New Job Jigsaw

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In January Graham Tyrrell joined the team as the University’s new Head of Digital.
With over 15 years’ experience in web and digital work, he’s worked in a number of not-for-profit organisations.

We promised you a post from Graham, to see what he’s been up to so far – so here it is…

I always see the start of a new job like starting a jigsaw. One of those fiendishly hard puzzles where they don’t print the final picture on the box. Oh, and they don’t tell you how many pieces there are. Nor whether they’re all in the box to start with!

Jigsaw puzzleSo you dive in headlong, start with the corners and then try to build up the edges. Sometimes you put things in the wrong places, sometimes you scrap it and start again, then suddenly you get that little thrill when you see where a couple of edge sections can join up.

I started my job here as Head of Digital in the middle of January and that’s where you find me today, just putting together some of the edges of my work jigsaw. Meeting as many people across the University as possible, finding out what they do, what their needs are going to be from the Digital team, and how they’ll fit into the overall picture.

There have been times already where I’ve had to move pieces around as they don’t fit together how I originally thought they did. But at least I’m starting to understand the general type of picture I’m meant to be creating.

What have I learned so far?

I’ve learned that the Go Mobile project is a mammoth task that has impacts across the whole University. The project names belies a complexity beyond just making the website mobile optimised.

The Corporate Web Team, which I’m going to be referring from now on as the Digital Team, are a friendly, highly skilled and dedicated bunch of people. I’m really looking forward to working with and leading the team.

That it’s totally impossible to find anything via the staff homepage, but that apparently one of my first major projects for me is to introduce a new intranet to the University.

That the Digital Team will be working incredibly hard with NUIT over the coming months to take the University’s digital presence to the next level.

….and lots, lots more but I was always told to keep the audience wanting more.

So what’s next?

Well as all jigsaw aficionados know, once you’ve done the edges the next bit is to start on the blue sky!

Image credit: Jigsaw Puzzle 01 by Björn Larsson licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

What We’ve Learned From One Year of Blogging

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One year ago today we published our first post on this blog. A year on I’m looking back on what we’ve learned from weekly blogging and writing our monthly round-up.

We like to write

Who’d have thought it, hey? A content team who likes words and enjoys crafting them to communicate with an audience. We’ve written 93 posts that include:

  • introductions to key themes in web development
  • how to guides for different tools and software
  • top tips for writing for the web and search engine optimisation
  • case studies of projects we’ve worked on
  • rants about topics close to our hearts, like FAQs

We’ve found writing our fortnightly team update a great way to share what we’re working on. It’s also made us realise just how much we really do!

Our monthly blog round-up is popular

We use MailChimp to send a round-up of the blog posts we’ve written each month. Through this system we can see how many times each email has been opened and which links have been followed. The stats from this are really encouraging.

The open rate fluctuates from 25-35%. This is well above the industry average of 15%.

10% of traffic to our site over the year has come from our monthly newsletters.

We like to collaborate

The blog is managed by our editorial team, which currently makes up around 50% of the whole web team. We’re the primary authors of the posts you read. But lately we’ve been encouraging other members of the team to write for us. We’ve had two posts already from Andy. And we’ve got three more from other members of the team waiting in drafts ready to post in the next few weeks.

Over the year we’ve also had three guest posts from colleagues outside our team. They all focus on the training and support we offer to our community of web editors.

People outside the University are reading our posts

And not only that, they’re sharing our content. We’ve written quite a few posts on the web governance tool SiteImprove. The SiteImprove team have picked up on our tutorials and shared them with their followers:

We’re ready for year two

Now we head into our second year of blogging. There’s a lot of change ahead for us as a team, with a new office, new team members and a move towards an Agile way of working. You can expect to see these changes reflected in this blog. We’ll have new writers and a whole new range of topics – so watch this space.