Why Deleting Old Stuff on Your Website is Good

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I bet one of these situations is familiar to you:

  • struggling to close an exploding sock drawer because it’s jammed packed full
  • slamming shut your wardrobe to stop an avalanche of shoes from escaping
  • repeatedly ignoring the message popping up in your email shouting that ‘Your inbox is full’

Yup, hands up guilty as charged. I’ve done this… actually all of these.

What do these problems have in common? They are visible, physical problems (especially exploding sock drawers). They impact negatively on your life; that jammed-shut drawer, all those emails clogging up your inbox.

These are things we know we need to sort out so they stop being a problem. But they’re often tedious tasks.

We have the same problems with websites…

Over-flowing sock drawerExploding socks

Websites can have the same too-much-stuff problem as our sock drawer. But the real problem is it’s often invisible to us.

With websites, the problem starts when lots of ‘stuff’ builds up over time. Old documents and images, defunct logos, old versions of pages etc.

You may think this stuff is harmless; it’s all behind the scenes. You don’t link to them or use them anymore…. right?

Nope.

Just because you have removed a hyperlink to an old document for example, doesn’t mean it’s gone. If that old version still exists on your site, it’s still indexed and found by search engines and people.

Do or do not, there is no try

Your website may seem to work perfectly fine – but behind the scenes the stuff cluttering up your website can really harm it’s performance, peoples user experience – and sometimes even your reputation.

And here’s why.

Imagine somebody wants to find out the latest information about our student accommodation. Using a search engine they type in ‘student accommodation Newcastle University’.

The results list all the pages and documents that have been indexed as containing this information on the University’s website. Alongside some page links, a PDF is listed – uh oh…it’s for 2013!*

How can people trust us if our information is out of date?

This is why deleting stuff is good.

Ideally you’d delete the old content each time you replace it with new content on your website. But if you haven’t done that (or you have inherited a website from a hoarder) or just don’t know where to begin, then don’t worry help is at hand.

Delete keyMinimalist mantra

The minimalist method of cutting out clutter is an interesting approach to take. Take shoes for example.

Group all the similar shoes you have; trainers, sandals, boots etc. Decide which pairs of each type do you wear most often and want to keep, then remove the rest.

This is easily applied to your website; documents, images, logo’s, old versions of pages etc.

Decide which ones you need to keep. They are:

  • the most recent versions
  • being linked to in your content

Delete the rest.

Keep calm and stop the ROT

ROT stands for redundant, out-of-date or trivial. Large organisations (like us) that have a massive web presence find this a problem. By taking a good look at your site and deleting stuff you can stop the ROT.

Don’t treat your website like a file store. Keeping stuff ‘just in case’ on your website is:

  • dangerous – it is still indexed by search engines and found by people
  • lazy – just save it elsewhere
  • harmful – our reputation is jeopardised by out of date content, and gives a negative experience for users

As part of Go Mobile we will audit each site in the programme, and identify ROT. When making our websites work well for devices with small screens, deleting old stuff we don’t need is vital.

If you want any advice about where/how to start, just get in touch.

There’s also a good article from Paul Boag about dealing with ROT that’s worth a read.

*Relax…this search works perfectly well in real life – no old documents being indexed here!

Image credits:

Why do you have a Website?

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Why DO you have a website? Can you answer this question in around 50 words? Any bets you’ll find it hard.

Newcastle University has around 150 external facing websites.

Our best ones have an audience in mind, have a clear set of tasks or goals to support and we measure their success. They have a site purpose.

The worst ones exist because a new department or team was set up or we wanted to tell some people about something. These sites decay over time. They aren’t updated. No-one knows if they are supporting our business goals. They fill our web real estate with waffle and ‘just in case’ content. They have no site purpose.

Defining your site purpose

As part of our Go Mobile programme we’re writing a site purpose statement for each site. Grab a piece of flipchart paper and work through these steps:

  1. Know your audience

Who are the key audiences for your site? Brainstorm with colleagues to make sure you know who you are writing for. Be mindful of not just saying “everybody”. You’ll find it hard to prioritise content if you do.

  1. Tasks

For each of your audiences, think about what they want to do when they get to your site. What are their top tasks? Two or three will do.

  1. Business Goals

What do you want your site visitor to do? Business goals should be measurable eg increasing student applications by 10 % rather than being a task like “I want to apply”. Again, two or three will do.

  1. Content and tone of voice

Come up with some words and phrases that describe how you want to come across to your readers. Are you clear, complex, conversational or professional? How do you want them to feel: confused, empowered, confident or suspicious?

Once you’ve got all this, you’re ready to write your site purpose.

Writing your site purpose

We’re using an idea presented by Sara Wachter-Boettcher at Confab Europe 2014. You can find out more about it on her blog post: Content Mad Libs.

A Mad Lib is a fill-in-the-blanks exercise where, once completed, you have the beginnings of a site purpose. It looks a bit like this and comes in at around 50-70 words:

Fill in the blanks (Madlib exercise) for the Newcastle Web Team's website.

Corporate Web Development Team’s site purpose 

I’m not going to lie, some editors have found it painful to prioritise only two or three top tasks.

In some cases, we’ve explored whether we need more than one site purpose – more of a site section purpose if you like.

This tells me that some of our sites have too many audiences to support and perhaps need dividing up into smaller sites.

Content putter-uppers no more!

The site purpose statement gives our web editors a tool to prioritise content according to audience and business need.

Our editors aren’t just there to put content up on the site. Their role is to question, prioritise and rewrite.

So, when you get asked to add some content to a site, the answer isn’t just “yes, of course”.

You question the content: is it for my audience, does it support a task or business goal, does it need rewriting?

Then the content gets added. Or, more importantly, doesn’t, if it doesn’t fit the site purpose.

Have a go

There’s no need to wait for the Go Mobile programme to try and come up with your site purpose. Have a go using the steps provided. We’ve also got some templates on our website to help you (University Login required). Get in touch if you need some further help with this.

Let us know how you get on in the comments. Happy Madlibbing!

Why ‘Under Construction’ Notices are Bad Practice

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In the early days of the web ‘under construction’ notices or animated construction worker images were common on websites if an organisation didn’t have any content to add to a page. These messages have fallen out of fashion but have been replaced by messages such as ‘coming soon’ or ‘information to follow’.

The terminology and formatting of this message may have changed, but the outcome is the same – a dead end for users.

under construction notice

A dead end for users

Imagine a prospective student has clicked through to a page on your website expecting to find something out. Instead of an answer or information to help them complete a task, they are greeted with nothing more than an ‘information coming soon’ message.

How do they feel? Disappointed and frustrated. What do they do? They leave.

Perhaps they come back at a later date to check if the page has been updated but it’s more likely they will go somewhere else to find the information they need or worse… go to a competitor’s site.

People generally go to a website to find an answer to a question or to complete a task. An ‘under construction’ notice doesn’t tell your customer anything and is therefore a waste of their time.

Damage to credibility

‘Under construction’ notices can also damage the credibility of your website. They make the page look sloppy and unfinished. This consequently reflects badly on the organisation, giving the impression that the organisation is uncommitted and unprofessional. It could also mean that users don’t trust the other information on your site.

Bad for SEO

Search engines also respond badly to ‘under construction’ pages. If there’s no content on a page the search engine won’t rank it very highly.

Worse, if the page has a meaningful title containing key words that people are searching for, it may come up in search results. Your reader goes to read more on the page only to discover that it contains no content. This is harmful to your organisation’s credibility.

Solutions when waiting for content

If it’s business critical to advertise something (eg funding opportunities or a new research facility) before the full details are available you should add relevant information rather than a blank page. To do this, you should:

  • think about the information you already have about the funding, research facility etc
  • add relevant signposting to another site if appropriate
  • include contact details for questions until the content can be added to the site
  • update with further information as soon as it is available

Final thoughts

Finally, if you don’t have any meaningful content to add to the site don’t add a new page. A blank page or a page with irrelevant information is more harmful than excluding information altogether. You wouldn’t publish a brochure containing a blank page with a generic ‘coming soon message’, so the same rules apply to the web.

Visit our website for help on planning web content (University login required).

Image credit: Under Construction Grunge Sign by Nicolas Raymond, www.freestock.ca, licensed under CC BY 3.0

Team update: 11 – 24 June

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It’s time again to find out what we’ve been up to over the past couple of weeks.

Go Mobile programme

Linda ran Clarity Grader reports on the undergraduate courses to help their team with improving the readability of their website.

We attended a PG Web Research session that detailed the user research and analytics results for the new postgraduate website, so far it’s been a complete success.

Technical developments

We’ve set standards around building news, events and staff lists in T4 to introduce greater consistency across our websites. We’re planning to introduce this through the T4 migration process.

Continuing to sign off components in T4 and as we apply these new components to real content we realise we need to update things again…

All the top 20 websites have been imported into T4 and are ready to be edited – Go team!

Design

Base style sheets have been added into the T4 CMS:

  • Research
  • Press Office
  • Undergraduate
  • About
  • Study
  • Open Day
  • Schools and Colleges
  • Law School
  • Architecture, Planning & Landscape
  • Ageing
  • Social Renewal
  • Sustainability

Training and support

Jane and Lisa delivered a Planning and Writing Web Content training session on Monday 22 June, that’s 10 customers who left all fired up about writing well for the web!

Anne with support from Lisa delivered a T4 training session on Tuesday 23 June.

Ongoing updates are being made to our training materials.

We’re also aiming to provide a few lines of help beside each field in T4. This will help our end users as they add content in the system.

We’ve received 44 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 19 of them.

Campaigns and web developments

That business as usual is still coming in….

Emma C met with colleagues from the PARTNERS team to plan a new student focused site for the Assessed Summer School.

Lisa is working on international content for the Pre-Arrival site.

Emma B has been working with colleagues in Philosophical Studies and SACS to overhaul their websites as well as setting up a new internal site for the School of English and continuing to work on the Go Mobile programme.

Steve is working with Mechanical Engineering on setting up an internal site and helping to make changes to the Science Central pages. He is also continuing to meet with Schools within SAgE Faculty to look at their web provision and support.

Plans for the next few weeks

Exciting times for Go Mobile – the newly trained Web Editors for the Research website will be given access to their new site to get editing, using all the knowledge from our training.Supported by Jane, their Project Manager they will get to grips with prioritising what work needs to be tackled first.

We have a Web Communications Strategy Group meeting this month, where Gareth will provide a progress report about the Go Mobile project.

Jane and Gareth will be meeting with the Faculty Impact Officers, with members of the Press and Digital Marketing team to discuss how to raise the profile of our research impact.

Lisa will be holidaying in the lovely Lake District – better pack those waterproofs…

See you next time!

Six Articles that will Help you Improve your Content

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I read. A lot. And I love to share what I’m reading when I find something that will prove interesting or helpful to others.

Here are six articles that provide further information on some of the concepts we cover in our training for web editors. They offer practical tips on improving your content, from adding structure to enhancing search optimisation. Many also include reminders of the essential elements of writing for the web.

1. Writing great page titles and headings

A great practical guide to writing page titles and headings. Learn how you can write headings to engage and inform your users, and improve the search optimisation of your page. All examples included are from university websites.

“three guidelines that will help you create titles and headings that rock: 1) describe, 2) contextualize and 3) simplify and clarify.”

Read the full article on the Meet Content blog: Introducing Your Content – Page Titles and Headings

2. The importance of an introduction

This article by Jakob Nielsen from 2007 is still relevant today. It highlights the importance of introductory text on a web page… but only when done well.

“short intros can increase usability by explaining the remaining content’s purpose”

Read the full article on the Nielsen Norman Group website: Blah-Blah Text: Keep, Cut, or Kill?

3. Bold benefits your readers and search ranking

This article makes it on to the list simply for having a reference to Star Trek.

Ok, not really. The idea of using bold to aid search engine optimisation was something that participants in our first training session found useful. Here’s an article that outlines it in more detail.

“the head of Google’s webspam team, Matt Cutts, has hinted that the search engine might look favourably on bolded phrases.”

Read the full article on the Sticky Content blog: To boldly go – how bolding words can give you SEO lift-off

4. How to improve information-rich websites

We’ve all got pages on our sites where there’s a lot of information to cover. Sometimes it’s hard to see how we can make this less dense and more engaging. This article provides some solutions for how to present complex information without overwhelming your users.

“When there’s a blizzard of information users can struggle to complete the task they came to your site for.”

Read the full article on the Sticky Content blog: 3 problems with information-rich websites and how to solve them

5. The problem with duplicate content

This post presents three reasons why duplicate content is bad for your website. Find out how it affects your users, search engines and you.

“duplicate web content can impact findability, usability and user comprehension.”

Read the full article on the Meet Content blog: Why Duplicate Content Is Bad for the Web

6. Why you need an editorial calendar

Richard Prowse, our counterpart in the digital team at the University of Bath, offers an introduction to editorial calendars. He covers why they’re useful and what you need to consider when creating one.

“you can use an editorial calendar to plan which content you’ll need and by when”

Read the full article on Richard’s Content Bear blog: How to Create an Editorial Calendar

Help us build the ultimate reading list for web editors

Are there any articles that you’ve found helpful in explaining a concept relating to planning or writing web content? Share them in the comments.