Client: Cascadia Community College
(This page shows one part of the work I did for Cascadia. For an overview of that project, see Cascadia.edu website redesign.)
Challenges: Help Cascadia develop usable, professional-looking web content for a website redesign, and leave the marketing department with tools for maintaining the college’s voice and the content’s usability over time.
Dutchgirl’s solutions
After designing a modular, flexible site architecture for Cascadia.edu, I delivered content templates, guidelines, and standards and tutored content authors (administrators from departments across the college) in applying the guidelines and standards to their content.
The guidelines included special instructions for updating the homepage, calendar items, news items, promotions, and images. In the style guide, I included both editorial style standards and a 1-page cheat sheet of basic web writing guidelines.
» Cascadia style guide contents (PDF)
» Basic web writing guidelines included in the Cascadia style guide — see next:
Three rules for writing webpages
For Cascadia Community College web content authors
1. Make it short and simple
- Make it short: Avoid long paragraphs. Divide information into easy-to-grasp chunks by using h2 (and h3) subheads, short paragraphs, and bulleted lists or numbered steps.
- Stick to one thing at a time: One topic per page, one point per sentence, and one idea per paragraph.
2. Put the most important information first
- Use inverted-pyramid format: As in newspaper articles, start the page with the main message, and follow it with supporting content. The “fold” is where the page content meets the bottom of the screen without scrolling: Do not put any of the most important information in your topic below the fold.
- Frontload headings, list items, and links with keywords: When people arrive at a webpage, they scan headings, links, lists, and captions first. By packing those items with keywords (the words that most users would use to search on your topic), you’ll help users recognize information that’s relevant to them.
3. Be polite and straightforward
- Focus on value: Focus on what the site does that is valuable from the users’ point of view, as well as how Cascadia differs from other colleges. Promoting something without substance detracts from Cascadia’s image.
- Use the active voice: Address the site’s users as “you.” Don’t use language like “Students must provide their Social Security number” — instead, write “Include your Social Security number.”
- Use plain language: Avoid jargon and invented terminology. If you must use a technical term, tell people what it means. To make the site accessible to international audiences, avoid American idioms, slang, metaphors, analogies, and abbreviations.
- Include alt text/captioning: Include descriptive alternative text for all images and captioning for all movies, to make the site fully accessible to disabled users.
- No gratuitous multimedia: Use graphics, images, and movies only to support text content, provide information or instruction, or otherwise help people complete the tasks that they have come to the site to perform. Using multimedia gratuitously distracts people from the content you want them to see and the tasks they are trying to complete.
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