Before writing any content it is important to have an understanding of your audience. We create personas to describe and understand our target audience/s. This provides detailed insights to help develop content that meets their needs. It also helps us better understand if we are achieving the intended goals of our website.
Page 6 of 8
As a web editor, you play a key role in providing your audiences with a quality experience and ensuring your web content is:
- targeted
- useful
- accessible
- effective.
To take the guesswork out of the correct spelling and punctuation, La Trobe has created an Editorial Style Guide. It helps to ensure consistent style, punctuation and spelling across the site.
Each of you will have access to the guide, however, we’ve highlighted the top 5 essentials you need to know when editing.
Headings are much more than a big bold title. They provide structure and identify topics and subsections of your page. Headings help users skim over content to find what they are looking for.
A task-focused landing (TFL) page is a custom La Trobe University landing page. This is most common for microsite landing pages, to direct users to important parts of your site.
A TFL is modular with common features including landing features (large content boxes), content boxes (with or without images) and news or event listings. Editors can update a TFL, but the process differs from standard editing principles.
Web analytics defines the collection and analysis of user data from a website.
From when a user lands on a website, data and user activity is being collected. Understanding the basics of analytics provides insights into how a website is performing.
We’ve all had that moment where we think we’ve found the page we’re looking for, only to discover it is a broken link. It’s frustrating, isn’t it? As a website editor, you should always be on the lookout for broken links on your site as they are bad for your user, your SEO and your overall site reputation.
Webforms are a common feature on websites.
They help the user complete an action, and organisations and businesses respond to this action.
We’ve all seen these forms online:
- Booking form
- Enquiry form
- Newsletter subscription form
- Application form
- Feedback form
- Event registration
- Online sale form (not available on our CMS)
These forms collect data provided by a user, which is then processed by a server and sent to the form owner.
An expert’s guide to alt-text
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. The same goes for web images, but in most instances, it’s worth 125 characters or less.
An accordion is a simple way to display content rich information. Accordions are an easy way of presenting content that doesn’t fit into a list item and can help reduce information overload and page length.
