Web content - hints and tips
For content to be useful, it must be readable, relevant and reliable, usable and accessible, and site and content must be discoverable. These notes are memory joggers, with links to more detail and free tools.
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Disclaimer: Recommendations are made in good faith, but you use at your own risk. Be sure to scan downloads for viruses. The free tools mentioned are not endorsed by CommunityNet but have been found useful or have been recommended by readers.
- Know your audiences - you may have a main audience and secondary audiences (supporters, professionals, recommenders etc.). Test with your users at each step of design and implementation.
- Write for your audience - with clear and suitable layout, headings, words, contents etc. Different sections of the site may have different audiences.
- For the web, use half the words and plain language, for a reading age of 8.
- On the web people don't read, they scan. Use titles, white space and hyperlinks to make scanable.
More detail:
28.03.2008 - Website has been removed as site is no longer active
Rachel McAlpine's tutorial: www.webpage content.com/arc_archive/85/5/
- Relevant - be selective. 5 good links or pages are better than 50 mediocre ones
- Be credible and accurate. Include on your website:
- Information about your authors and your organisation
- Physical contact address
- Where the information came from, how reliable and balanced it is and who selected it. (It is OK to have a personal viewpoint, but do make it clear.)
- The date each page was last updated
- When digitising records, archives etc, digitise the things that are likely to be used a lot. One approach is to digitise on demand - rather than digitise everything.
- Check: spell check and proof read
- Test: make sure online forms and other functionality works.
- Retest: regularly check links with link checkers like Xenu and fix broken ones.(http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html)
- Maintain: content must be maintained - who is going to do this? How will they do it, what skills and tools will they need and when will they do it? If you can't maintain it, don't publish.
- Collaborate: consider using a content management system (CMS). They reduce the level of skill and time needed to change pages, and allow collaborative ownership and maintenance of information. Open-source CMS' can be affordable and maintainable, but requires skill and experience to set-up.
More detail:
- Be Accessible and usable - helping people with visual and other disabilities helps all readers - even before they get old. Accessibility doesn't cost - it saves. Be:
- Fast - keep page sizes below 55 KB including graphics and other files
- Clean - keep HTML clean by pasting pure text; don't paste straight from word processing files. Use Notepad or PureText from http://stevemiller.net/puretext/
- Clear - keep good colour and brightness contrast between text and background
- Choose Verdana or other san-serif fonts; they are easier to read on screens.
- Adaptable - Make text resizable in the browser - design in ems not pixels; use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
- Access keys - they are easy to add and essential for accessibility
- Support and test on different browsers and monitor sizes
- Alter the appearance of links when visited - eg change colour
- Underline links or at least change appearance when 'mouse'd over
- Keep all important content in HTML
- Make sure printing does not cut off text
- Use JavaScript for non-essential enhancements only
- Use ALT (alternate) text for all images. Use ALT="" for spacer images.
- Downloadable files - templates or models for download may need special formats - RTF, TXT, JPG, GIF, PDF, Word, Excel, Comma delimited, etc. Always include file type & size in file download hyperlinks e.g. Memorandum of Understanding template (MS Word, 62 KB)
- Multi media modes - get more out of your content by using in several media e.g. print, press, web, intranet, radio, TV, blogs, text messages, WAP, iPod, editable forms.
- Sharable - to more easily share content between sites, use XML & XSL, and RSS
- Maintainable - once images etc. are digital you will need to be able to migrate them to new formats over time to remain accessible. Archive your source materials.
- Protected - ensure copyright is protected eg use watermarks or have a permissions process.
- Legal - ensure that they don't infringe others copyright, IP or cultural rights
- Things to avoid - Splash pages, frames, Flash and other 'cool' formats, large files, content only in Word or Adobe PDF, images used for navigation, continually flashing or animated images, underlined text, italic text.
More detail:
- By site name:
- Choose a relevant and memorable site name…generally in the '.org.nz' series…
- short, case insensitive, avoid hyphens…relevant to your organisation - eg www.angoa.org.nz or www.carers.org.nz or off the wall but memorable eg Stuff, Yahoo.
- By search engines:
- Use lowercase words separated by hyphens for page names
- Add 'meta data' tags - Title, Description, and Keyword
- Use Dublin Core metadata IF your site search engine or database uses it
- Include search keywords naturally in the initial text on the page
- By links from other websites:
- Actively ask for links to your site.
- Don't force everyone to only link to your home page. Construct 'discovery URLs' - entry points to useful content
- Make 'discovery URLs' easy to remember and use eg www.community.net.nz/panui
- Make 'discovery URLs' permanent. Don't break links to you by changing your site file structure.
Be Discoverable - within your site
- Have simple consistent, text navigation, on every page
- Use users' words, not yours, for the navigation
- Give alternate routes to information: good site search, hierarchical site map, alphabetical index
More detail: Online guides:
Disclaimer: Recommendations are made in good faith, but you use at your own risk. Be sure to scan downloads for viruses.
(Version 1.0 21 July 2006)