Editorial Guidelines
Learn how to create and curate content that is engaging, informative, useful, and accessible to a wide range of users.
How to Use This Guide
This guide is intended to help website owners create and curate content that is engaging, informative, useful, and accessible to a wide range of users, while also being in alignment with the broader digital goals of the University. With this guide, site owners will learn how to:
- Enhance content structure
- Create engaging content
- Improve search engine optimization (SEO)
- Choose an appropriate style guide
- Format content to increase readability
To connect with your readers, you first need to understand who they are and why they come to your site. If analytics are available, start there.
If you use Google Analytics, here are some numbers to watch:
- Sessions
- Users
- Pages per sessions
- Session duration
- Bounce rate
- Behavior
- Acquisition
You'll also want to make note of the languages, operating systems, browsers, and devices audiences use to access your site. This knowledge will help you choose content users value and structure it to create a pleasant experience.
Knowing who your readers are gives some indication of why they came to your site, but that’s an incomplete picture. What content do they view most? What do they read, watch, or listen to regularly?
It’s also important to consider your organization’s mission and goals. What do you want to tell visitors to your site?
Answering these questions will help you decide on an editorial mission for your site; once you have one, give primacy in structure and presentation to the content that meets those criteria.
For example, if readers are coming to your site to perform a task, set up the first stage of that task as a call to action with a concise, unambiguous action verb.
Most users do not read web pages in their entirety. They scan them—typically in an F-shaped pattern. Structure your content to make the most of this behavior.
Prioritize your content into sections; then put the most important information in the first sentence or paragraph of each section, and elaborate with:
- Subtitles that include key words
- Descriptions, briefly
- Numbered or bulleted lists
- Pull quotes (text presented as a graphic element) to highlight key phrases
Strive to include no more than 600 words of text per page, though some content may require longer word counts, such as descriptive research content. In those cases, it’s even more important to structure the content into digestible sections.
Worth noting: Analytics suggest that including video in your content will increase the likelihood users will also read surrounding text or articles.
If users frequent a set of instructions, use subtitles and numbered lists to define the steps in the process. Video, audio, and graphics illustrate best, when available.