Setting Your Style: Creating a Style Guide to Empower Your Organization
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
0 likes•54 views
Presentation at edUi 2016 in Charlottesville, VA. Like most websites, UNC Libraries has more content than staff available to manage it. Our once a year content audit wasn’t enough. We recognized a need to empower our content owners to assess, streamline, and improve their writing on an ongoing basis. In collaboration with our Communications department, we created a guide that covers style, voice, tone, accessibility, branding, and other content guidelines that support our strategic plan. The guide focuses on core design principles that inform the content of our website as a whole. Our guide is also iterative – a living document that will develop over time. Once completed, we plan on running a series of staff workshops to introduce the guidelines and give content owners practical experience implementing the standards in their own writing. Our goal is for them to think about the guide and its principles every time they edit a webpage.
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Setting Your Style: Creating a Style Guide to Empower Your Organization
Similar to Setting Your Style: Creating a Style Guide to Empower Your Organization (20)
More from Sarah Joy Arnold
More from Sarah Joy Arnold (11)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Setting Your Style: Creating a Style Guide to Empower Your Organization
- 1. Setting Your Style Creating a Style Guide to Empower Your Organization Chad Haefele Interim Head of User Experience Sarah Arnold Instructional Technology Librarian
- 3. Types of style guides ● Editorial ● Specifications ● Toolkits
- 4. Editorial ● Word Lists ● Formatting ● Language choices ● See also: MLA, Chicago, etc.
- 5. Editorial
- 6. Specifications ● Technical ● Self-enforcing ● Easy to validate
- 7. Toolkits ● Building Blocks ● Mix of code and other resources ● Can be brand guidelines
- 8. Toolkits ● Building Blocks ● Mix of code and other resources ● Can be brand guidelines
- 16. Identity.unc.edu
- 17. U of Illinois Library publish.illinois.edu/libraryweb/content-style-guide/
- 18. U of Virginia Library styleguide.library.virginia.edu
- 19. Ours
- 20. Planning Process ● There’s a problem ○ Annual content audit processes for LibGuides and Wordpress site ○ Inconsistency and uncertainty ● First steps ○ Research and examples ○ Developed principles and sections ○ Working meetings with UX and Communications Department Photo: Jolene Thompson
- 21. What to Consider ● Type of style guide that works best ● Institutional goals and priorities ● Strategic plan and/or mission
- 22. More Planning ● Edit, edit, edit ○ Feedback and adjustments ○ Putting our guidelines to work ● Principles and goals ○ Focus on user needs ○ Voice and Tone ● Broad versus exhaustive ○ Accessibility standards ○ Keep in mind what already exists
- 23. More to Consider ● Does a guide already exist? ○ Communications Department ○ Publicity or Print style guide ○ Other platforms
- 24. What We Learned ● It’s not a style guide in the traditional sense ○ Writing for the web approach ● Educate yourself ● Explain why it matters ● Collaboration and communication are key ● Always a draft, never a final version
- 25. Workshops ● Promotional and educational ● Practice, practice, practice ● Empower library staff and create advocates ● Collaboration gets results
- 26. Workshops
- 28. Before
- 29. After
- 30. Before
- 31. After
- 32. Questions? Special thanks to: Daniel Pshock UX & Web Content Strategy Coordinator University of Houston
Editor's Notes
- False pretenses - what we ended up with isn’t a simple “style guide”. That’s because the term “style guide” is really a broad umbrella. We looked at lots of them in our processes. An element of content strategy - useful, usable, findable Missing component of our regular content audit process
- Refworks has untold thousands of them. I don’t want to add another one to that mess.
- We already had this a little bit, from Library Communications office. We didn’t want/need to re-invent the wheel here. Automated checker? Was primarily aimed at print publications, but we used it de facto for the web too.
- This didn’t make sense for us either, we purposely don’t let most of our content owners have direct code access.
- “A living document”
- More context given than something like HTML5, so slightly editorial
- “This section is non-normative”
- Very editorial, despite having a very short “word list” https://ux.mailchimp.com/patterns has lots of code snippets
- Has guidelines for how to create alpha and beta labels
- Don’t use a trademark next to an Apple logo
- “Do not use strobing content”
- Largely brand guidelines, but there is a section on writing for the web
- Separate annual content audits Wordpress/main site approach from “does this page need to exist?” to in recent years more specific questions Is the content of this page accurate and up to date? Is the page written in plain language, avoiding library jargon? Is the page located in a logical place within the site navigation? LibGuides process asked librarians to fix broken links and determine if a page should still exist based on usage stats Neither had process in place to report back General inconsistency and uncertainty among content creators/staff > some responded, some didn’t First steps Daniel began the process of researching and looking to other style guide examples Working meetings to develop principles and sections Brought Communications department on board early for buy-in and support
- Type of style guide as Chad has reviewed Goal and priorities of your institution Is there a strategic plan? Is there a mission statement? At UNC we were working through our 5-year strategic plan: (click) Read Vision: “We aspire to be a leader among academic research libraries in meeting users’ evolving knowledge-creation and knowledge management needs. Building on a foundation of library excellence at the nation’s first public university, we will define and integrate new library roles, practices, partnerships, and technologies in achieving this vision.” + principles include… Identifying users’ needs Promoting and encouraging intelligent risk-taking Develop and employ staff expertise to create a cohesive, team-based culture that meets users’ needs Not only empower staff, but it will help get buy-in because you’ve aligned it to the goals
- Once we developed our central principles and sections, we continued editing and reviewing the guide Rewrote to actually follow our own guidelines > positive and plain language, active voice First principle was to focus on user needs and went from there Determined the voice and tone of the library Challenging because each of our libraries is different (Wilson vs. Undergrad) Voice = personality, what distinguishes us from other libraries/institutions Tone = mood or feeling, determined by context Moved away from nitty gritty specifics to broad guidelines that could be interpreted in different ways depending on the situation We also baked in our LibGuides guidelines in addition to main Wordpress site since there’s a lot of overlap between content creators on both platforms
- Initially we were writing a style guide, at least that’s what we called it But we also had an already well-used In-house style guide and publicity toolkit created and maintained by the Communications department We wanted out guide to work hand-in-hand with these rather than recreating them In-house style guide = specific language and terms to use in both print and online publications Publicity toolkit = details on logos and print templates like library letterhead
- It’s not a style guide > it’s writing for the web Defines content, voice and tone, plain language, and other general ideas to follow No need to confuse staff when you want to bring them on board with you Called “Creating Effective UNC Library Web Content” Educate yourself > research and look at other examples Communications Director suggested we add a purpose to give content creators an idea of why this document matters and how it fits in with their work Collaborate with each other, Communications, and content creators Share it and create an open discussion around it Always a draft > this is one of our principles Always be iterating Web best practices will change, platforms will change, users will change You want this document to be malleable
- Empower staff and gain more supporters to promote your goals and help improve the content of your site
- Course page/LibGuide: http://guides.lib.unc.edu/aaad298 (Sarah) LibGuides example from workshops Subject expertise is key