Hello, this is the third blog in my series looking at website content review processes – aimed at website managers working in public sector and research organisations. Read the first blog on overall processes and the second on content reviewer guidelines. In this blog I’ll look at a brief example checklist which can help you to ensure consistency of formatting, tone, language and even improve your site’s SEO (search engine optimisation) as part of the content review process.
Once you have completed the review process for any content which needs a subject expert reviewer, you can move on to checking and updating the site page by page. I tend to do this by myself as having one person with an eagle-eye view of the formatting, language tone etc makes everything flow a bit better than having it done piecemeal by a team of people (and also I’m a bit of a control freak!).
Here’s the checklist I use on each page to remind me what to check for and update/include if necessary. It’s pretty short but helpful as a reminder:
- Tone and language – for example saying ‘we’ and our’ where appropriate to make the content sound ‘friendlier’, sentences not too long, jargon and acronyms definitely explained fully etc.
- Ensuring visual formatting is consistent – for example all headings of the same level appear in the same font style, consistency with use of bold and italic text, images all have consistent alt text etc. Again, the specifics will depend on your own website style but as a rule it’s good to have things the same across the site to ensure a smooth user experience.
- Automated link checking – I use Webmaster Tools for this. However don’t rely on it to find links which are what I call ‘broken relevancy’ links…
- Replacing ‘broken relevancy’ links – by this I mean something which is still a live web page (and so doesn’t return a 404 error) but where the content is no longer relevant or appropriate to serve the purpose of linking to it. If you’re following the process I outlined and the reviewer guidelines then your subject experts should have picked these out already so all you have to do is replace the links with what your reviewers have suggested.
- For improved SEO try to ensure that links use keywords – for example instead of using ‘click here’ as the hypertext, try to use text which includes words relevant to the content of the page and the content on the page you are linking to.
Hopefully this is a helpful example of the key things to look out for – and remember, doing this properly once and getting a process in place means a future of being able to do ‘quick and dirty’ content reviews! Also, for xkcd’s take on the important of content, check out this comic.
In the final blog of this series I’ll be looking at examples of good practice in presenting research findings and policy information on the web.