Does your company have an Editorial or Writing Style Guide? Is it consistently applied across your site? Doing so can greatly increase the quality and usability of the content on your site.
Why?
Consider a user’s confusion if the same department (or worse, your product) is referred to by three different names or spellings on different pages on your site. Yes, it happens, probably more than any of us want to admit. In large, sprawling organizations, getting and keeping everyone on the same page is almost impossible.
But how are you supposed to monitor all of the continuously changing content across your site to ensure consistency with your Editorial Style Guide?
Enter DubBot’s Custom Policies!
With Custom Policies, you can take big steps towards that dream of maintaining a consistent editorial style across your website.
How?
- A Custom Policy is written to flag pages that contain the content you specify across your page inventory in DubBot.
- Editors of those pages are then informed of the content they need to update by their DubBot Administrator. DubBot users, with permission, can see a listing of flagged issues in their DubBot dashboard and be shown at the page level just what was found.
- Once the updates are reported as complete on your website, the policy is run again to be sure the content has been updated.
Here are some examples of items a Custom Policy can flag for correction:
- Inconsistent usage of the company/university name and/or acronyms
- Incorrect naming of your company’s primary offering to the public, for example:
- For education: degree names and abbreviations
- For business: products and services
- Incorrect phone number formats
- Incorrect building names
- Any specialized words or phrases that are often misspelled (or misused) at your company
- Division/Department/Office of… consistent usage and to flag for renaming as names change over time
- Identify outdated brand guidelines and phrases across the site
And remember! You can customize your policies to serve your particular needs. The options are pretty much endless.
To educate your DubBot users and turn them into champions for your style guide, include links to the relevant style guide section in the Policy Notes. I found that it helps to explain the why’s of an item to help someone remember.
Your Editorial Style Guide not online?
Consider making that move – it helps to have it online and accessible for easy updates and sharing with others. They can’t know it if you don’t have it written down.
Going Beyond the Editorial Style Guide
Custom policies are also invaluable for the following types of changes outside of the style guide but are just as much a part of your responsibility to keep updated on the site:
- Systemic URL changes (remove or update URLs)
- People leaving your organization/ being replaced
- New phone numbers
- Renaming of units
- Need to remove someone’s name ASAP
- Finding faulty HTML across the site, ex.
- <b> tags, other old tags
- Fixed width tables
- Images w/o descriptions or that have bad alt tags
- Finding HTTP links
- Any CSS classes that may have changed
- Eliminate words in ALL CAPS without appropriate tags/style
- Emails in text without being linked with a mailto:
All this in addition to DubBot’s normal checks of Accessibility, Broken Links, Best Practices, Spelling, PDFs, and SEO.
Don’t forget! DubBot has an extensive Policy Library available for point-and-click installation as well as some other Custom Policies you can implement in the Help Center.
