Tag Archives: editorial style guide

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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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.

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Content Governance: People, Processes and Policies

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I’m not sure why I’ve drawn the short straw here: I get to introduce you all to the idea of content governance. Wait, don’t leave yet!

2005: we had websites with no direction

We only have to roll back about 10 years to see what our website was like with minimal governance. We had duplicated content all over the place. There were sites that didn’t follow our branding. We had a team of content-putter-uppers who just did but didn’t ask why.

What’s changed?

We still get asked to “just build a website” or “stick some content on this page”. But, nowadays, the answer is just as likely to be “no” as “yes”.

This is because we have content policies, style guides, training and the right people: our content governance.

Going mobile is helping us with content governance

We’re using the Go Mobile programme to reinforce the importance of governance. There are some elements to making it a success: people, lifecycle, style guides and training.

People

With each new project we’re making sure we have at least one named editor. This means we’ve got a person in post whose job it is to manage the website and its content.

We’re still not 100% there. Web editor roles are often part of another post at the University. We are getting some accountability. And we’re working on making sure content editors have enough time to edit.

Content life cycle

Each Go Mobile site development isn’t just a project with an end date. We’re planning reviews of site content to make sure we’re maintaining quality.

We’re working with editors to introduce content management tools. These include editorial calendars, analytics and Siteimprove.

Style guides

We’ve had a set of web content standards from day one. We’ve just not been good at letting people know about them or enforcing them.

Go Mobile is raising awareness not only that our standards exist but also of their importance. These are not rules for the sake of it. They’re there to help our site users access the content they need on all devices.

If content doesn’t meet our standards, we have the authority to say it doesn’t go live.

Training

We can’t write a style guide, leave it hidden in a cupboard somewhere and then moan if people don’t use it! So we’ve developed training to help communicate our standards. We’ve produced a demo site that presents our new content design in the context of our standards.

Beyond Go Mobile

Through Go Mobile, we’re developing a skilled group of content editors. They are responsible for our web content and will be ambassadors for maintaining quality websites.

We’ve bench-marked our sites. We know how well they score for readability and whether they follow our new standards.

We’re planning to review sites around 6-8 months after they’ve launched. This will help us make sure we’re maintaining quality.

Content governance covers much more than I’ve outlined here – if we can get this right though, we’re well on our way to managing our web content effectively.

Let us know in the comments how you keep on top of content quality. Do you have any formal content governance?

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Time and the 24 Hour Clock – Editorial Style Update

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We’ve recently updated our editorial style guide to reflect a change in our content standard relating to time.

We’re now using the 24 hour clock to represent times on our website. We find it’s better for international audiences and for displaying time in lists and tables.

See the full update to our editorial style guide on our website (University login required).

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Find Content Inconsistencies Quickly and Easily using Siteimprove Policy

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Use of consistent language and terminology helps to raise the reputation of your website.

We have content standards and style guides in place for the University.

But, with over 100 websites and many editors, communicating and maintaining standards is a challenge.

We use Siteimprove, a quality assurance software, to help us find and fix broken links and misspellings on our websites.

Use Siteimprove Policy to remove unwanted content

Siteimprove also has a Policy function that we’re using to inform our editors about:

  • terms we don’t want on the website – such as ‘click here’
  • content changes – eg name of an Academic Unit or Service, or highlighting content that has changed its address
  • reinforcing a standard term – eg Newcastle University not University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Siteimprove does the hard work of finding and listing the content that needs fixing. This makes it easy for editors to follow our content standards.

If you’re a University web editor already using Siteimprove you can start using the Policy tab today.

How it works

You can find the Policy tab in the Services drop down menu:

Siteimprove - how to find the Policy function

Here you’ll find a list of policies created by the web team, and the number of violations on your website:

Policies list in Siteimprove Web Governance Software

Clicking on a policy description reveals:

  •  a policy summary
  • advice on what the editor needs to do
  • a list of all pages where a violation occurs

Siteimprove policy summary and location of violations

You know where the errors are, now let’s get those violations down to zero!

Create your own policies

You can create local website policies for terms that are specific to your content. View the Siteimprove Policy video tutorial to get started.

Access to Siteimprove

Request access to Siteimprove (University Login required) to get started on your website content clean up.

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