THE WEB EDITOR S SURVIVAL GUIDE

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Stewart Fitzgerald
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1 GUIDE THE WEB EDITOR S SURVIVAL GUIDE As a web editor you are responsible for one of the most important points of contact to your clients: your website. Visitors have high expectations to the user experience of your website and they don t easily forgive you for major mistakes neither does your Head of Communications! He or she wants your organization s messaging to be consistent and professional and relies on you for ensuring your website meets these requirements. Maintain the reputation of your business and save your supervisor from getting worked up; this survival guide will help web editors on how to respond to website related requests from your boss - like a boss!

2 PROBLEM RAISED BY YOUR BOSS: WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT: Why am I seeing our old visual identity? When doing a website redesign, individual pages sometimes miss the makeover session, and links to these old pages are carried over with the launch of the new site. Linking to pages following an outdated template hurts the consistency and branding on the site and thus negatively affects the user experience. simsam corp. BEST PRACTICE: Luckily, you can identify pages with old templates by the outdated pieces of HTML code they share. Do a search for the old HTML to locate the affected pages, which you can then either remove or redesign. I tried to download a report from our website, and it looked weird. If you have documents available for download on your website, you want to make sure they look the way they were intended to, when viewed by visitors. The safest solution is to make sure that all downloadable documents are in Portable Document Format (PDF). PDFs will look and print the same on all computers whereas other documents may not. Further, there are different software requirements for reading different file types, but PDF is a universally accepted type. δφϖδφσβϖ φαβϖφβ φδβ σ<φσβ σφβ φβ σ<φβσ<δ φϖφφγεγττγγ3 BEST PRACTICE: In your content map or media library, locate all documents intended for download on your website and make sure their file types are PDF. Update and replace if needed. 2

3 I have no idea what this >>click here<< link is supposed to do. When using an in-text link (a link that is embedded in the text flow, like this link to the home page of Siteimprove s website), it is very important to provide a context to the link. In other words, let the visitor know to what and to where the given link will direct them to if clicked. Out of context in-text links such as Click here and Read more are generally not descriptive enough for visitors in general but also for search engines and assistive technologies like screen readers. Hence, non-descriptive anchor texts harm both the SEO and the accessibility of your website. CLICK HERE BEST PRACTICE: Locate all instances of common non-descriptive link texts such as Click here and Read more and rewrite them, so that the sentence accurately describes the destination of the link and makes sense even when taken out of its context. What is this page about? All pages on your website should have a unique page title and preferably sub-headers for a clear structure. If not, it is difficult for visitors, and search engines, to determine what a specific page is about. BEST PRACTICE: Locate any empty or duplicate headers (including page titles and headers) and write some unique, concise and keyword-focused headers instead. For more SEO best practices, please consult our guide 17 Killers of Your SEO Efforts and How to Fix Them. 3

4 I don t understand half of this text! As the point of contact to the public, your website is likely to have a very broad audience; from prospects and peers, to journalists and candidates. Not all visitors are familiar with the lingo of your industry, so you might want to keep the technical jargon to a minimum. Not using straight forward terminology on your website could greatly affect the user experience. B2B, B2C, B2G, ROI, CFO, CAO CEO, CORP. BEST PRACTICE: Identify jargon words used in your organization whose meaning is lost to the general audience. Locate these terms and rewrite them in non-technical language instead. Err.. You can t use that word. It just takes one misstep of a content editor to seriously damage the reputation of your brand. Not all offensive words are obvious, and every industry have specific terms you should avoid. For example, if you work in health care you probably have guidelines on when to use the word patient or citizen rather than client. BEST PRACTICE: Formulate a blacklist of terms based on the messaging of your brand, and then locate and eliminate any instances of violation. 4

5 What does cf mean? Ceramic fiber? Like jargon terms, visitors may not know what certain abbreviations mean. Furthermore, by spelling words out you reduce the risk of inconsistency, as it is not uncommon that abbreviations are spelled in varying ways. BEST PRACTICE: When you locate an abbreviation in your copy editing, scan your website for other instances of it and spell them all out. Why is this text in bold? For the best user experience, make sure that your styling across the website is consistent. Uses of formatting, like bold and italic, that are part of your visual identity should be formulated in your CSS (the style sheets that determine the look across your site). BEST PRACTICE: Any deviations from the CSS should be located, reviewed and possibly edited. Scan your website for HTML related to formatting not formulated in the CSS, and review if the formatting supports or hinders your communication. THAT S BOLD! 5

6 What s the point of this image?! For informational websites of companies and organizations, all images should serve a functional purpose and should not be purely decorative. BEST PRACTICE: Go through your image files and review to what extent they help convey the message of the pages where they are located and whether they support the user journey in terms of finding information and completing tasks. At the same time, review the alt texts of the images. All your images should have a descriptive and meaningful alt text conveying the same message in text as the image does in itself. If you have a hard time writing an effective alt text, it might be because the given image is more decorative than functional. Consider removing or replacing with another image. Images take too long to load! Smaller size and lower resolution images will usually do the job just fine in conveying your message, whereas images of several megabytes can significantly worsen the loading time of your pages, and hence the user experience. BEST PRACTICE: In your content map or media library, locate all images on your site and make sure their size is less than 1 MB. Resize and replace if needed. 6

7 That person doesn t work here anymore! Organizations continuously change. Departments merge or are renamed, employees receive another title, leave or move, products are presented in a new way. As a web editor, you need to be on top of all these changes to avoid confusion and to ensure consistent messaging. BEST PRACTICE: Search for outdated information across your website, such as old product names and former employees, and replace with correct information. Can you link to our privacy policy? We do have a privacy policy, right? Depending on the law of the country your organization is located in, you are most likely required, or at least expected, to have a privacy policy on your website available to all visitors. BEST PRACTICE: Create a page dedicated to your organization s privacy policy, and then add a link to this page across the website, for example in your navigation menu, so that visitors can easily find it regardless of which page they are currently on. 7

8 Finally! Now we comply with the regulations of the Bureau of Letter Soup. Let everybody know! As with the privacy policy, you might also be required to inform your website visitors which regulatory bodies of your industry you comply with. BEST PRACTICE: Add external links to the websites of relevant regulatory bodies across your website, for example in your navigation menu, so that visitors can easily find them regardless of which page they are currently on. The Federal Agency of Cybersecurity just called. We got a problem. There is some information which you are simply not allowed to put on your website. This includes any personal information that might help identify individuals without their consent. Examples include personal identification numbers, patient IDs, student IDs, etc. BEST PRACTICE: To scan your entire website for any personal identification numbers is a little tricky, but there is a way. Since you are not looking for a specific number, but rather a specific format of a number, for example xxxxxx-xxxx, you can do what is called a Regular Expression search. If you have no idea what this is, your organization s techie, or whoever is responsible for the support of your website, probably has. To set up a Regular Expression search, please liaise with this person. Delete the instances of privacy violations after they have been located. 8

9 My phone number is not listed right! Anyone who has edited an employee directory or a Contact us page knows that contact details, such as phone numbers and addresses, can be written in a number of ways. For example, when do you use spaces, hyphens and parentheses in a phone number? BEST PRACTICE: As with the personal identification numbers, you can do a Regular Expression search. Decide on a standard format for contact details to be used across your website and then do a search-and-replace by using Regular Expression. To set it up, liaise with your tech or website support department So, when is our seminar again? There is probably only one kind of information which is formatted more inconsistently than contact details: Times and dates. Do you write the date before the month or vice versa? Do you include the year? Do you use the 12h or the 24h clock? BEST PRACTICE: As with contact details formatting, you can do a Regular Expression search. Decide on a standard format for dates and times to be used across your website and then do a search-and-replace by using Regular Expression. To set it up, liaise with your tech or website support department. 9

Overwhelmed? Don t worry! You can easily automate these best practices of web editing.

policies are violated, so that you can act immediately and make sure all your content is

You can employ both predefined policies, like the ones above, and formulate your own based on

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10 Overwhelmed? Don t worry! You can easily automate these best practices of web editing. With Siteimprove s Policy module, you will receive notifications whenever your website policies are violated, so that you can act immediately and make sure all your content is consistent and compliant. You can employ both predefined policies, like the ones above, and formulate your own based on your organization s style and brand guidelines! GET A FREE DEMO OF SITEIMPROVE Become an even bigger web editing talent, by pairing this guide with these additional resources: 17 Killers of Your SEO Efforts and How to Fix Them The Accessibility Handbook Siteimprove During a Website Redesign Web Analytics - Where to Begin GET a free DEMO go.siteimprove.com/demo 10

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