{"id":1391,"date":"2016-01-13T11:03:39","date_gmt":"2016-01-13T11:03:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/?p=1391"},"modified":"2016-01-12T11:03:49","modified_gmt":"2016-01-12T11:03:49","slug":"improving-introductions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/2016\/01\/13\/improving-introductions\/","title":{"rendered":"Improving Introductions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You might have read our post on <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/2016\/01\/04\/making-new-years-resolutions-for-our-websites\/\">Making New Year&#8217;s Resolutions for our Websites<\/a>: mine was <strong>improving introductions to content<\/strong>. I&#8217;m going to expand on what this\u00a0means in this post.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re often reworking existing content rather than writing from scratch. And because of this it&#8217;s easy to get lazy and not bother to rework the introduction. The concern is that because it looks a little bit different, that&#8217;s enough.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1412\" style=\"width: 984px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1412\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1412\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/files\/2016\/01\/intro.jpg\" alt=\"Image showing the difference between a page title, introduction and body text. \" width=\"974\" height=\"245\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/files\/2016\/01\/intro.jpg 974w, https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/files\/2016\/01\/intro-300x75.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/files\/2016\/01\/intro-768x193.jpg 768w, https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/files\/2016\/01\/intro-500x126.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 974px) 100vw, 974px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-1412\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Our introduction is styled to look different to body text.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The introduction style is a new feature of our responsive design. It follows the title of a page and is a larger font size\u00a0to help highlight it. It also comes with its own content standards, it should:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>summarise the point of the page<\/li>\n<li>be no more than 50 characters<\/li>\n<li>be descriptive<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Working out if your introduction is any good<\/h2>\n<p>I\u2019m\u00a0inspired by Ida Aalen\u2019s approach to this\u00a0on the Gather Content blog about <a href=\"https:\/\/gathercontent.com\/blog\/testing-the-usability-of-text\">Testing the Usability of Text<\/a> (particularly your introduction).<\/p>\n<p>She suggests putting a copy of your content into word and\u00a0printing it out. You then\u00a0fold the paper so only the title and introduction are visible.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1414\" style=\"width: 594px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1414\" class=\"size-large wp-image-1414\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/files\/2016\/01\/20160111_1718521-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"Image of page introduction with content hidden - three questions that I think the hidden content might answer have been added. \" width=\"584\" height=\"438\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/files\/2016\/01\/20160111_1718521-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/files\/2016\/01\/20160111_1718521-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/files\/2016\/01\/20160111_1718521-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/files\/2016\/01\/20160111_1718521-400x300.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 584px) 100vw, 584px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-1414\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Will this content answer the questions I&#8217;ve asked?<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Next step, ask yourself (or your site users) to read the title and introduction. You should then\u00a0jot down three questions that you think the content will answer.<\/p>\n<p>Once done, you can review the page content and see whether it does what you expect. If it doesn&#8217;t, you can rewrite the page content or improve\u00a0your introduction.<\/p>\n<p>In this case, I&#8217;m pleased to say that the page answers the questions I thought of\u00a0&#8211; view our <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncl.ac.uk\/about\/facilities\/shop\/\">content on the Memorabilia Shop.<\/a><\/p>\n<h2>Have a go<\/h2>\n<p>Do your introductions work for you? Why not try this out on your colleagues or site users to objectively assess your content? Let us know how you get on in the comments.<\/p>\n<h2>Related blog posts<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/2015\/10\/21\/improving-page-titles-and-headlines\/\">Improving Page Titles and Headlines<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/2015\/08\/17\/how-meaningful-titles-and-descriptions-engage-site-visitors\/\">How Meaningful Titles and Descriptions Engage Site Visitors<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/2015\/04\/21\/how-to-structure-content-on-a-webpage\/\">How to Structure Content on a Webpage<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You might have read our post on Making New Year&#8217;s Resolutions for our Websites: mine was improving introductions to content. I&#8217;m going to expand on what this\u00a0means in this post. We&#8217;re often reworking existing content rather than writing from scratch. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/2016\/01\/13\/improving-introductions\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3934,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-1391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-content","tag-writing-for-the-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3934"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1391"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1419,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391\/revisions\/1419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}