Before everyone goes away for a well earned break, I thought I would spoil you with a small gift of five festive themed tips to help you make your web pages more accessible.
Warning: this post may contain puns and tenuous festive references
Category: Content design techniques
One of the most popular questions I am asked is ‘how do I make my website more searchable?’. With so much of our traffic coming from search engines like Google, Bing and Baidu (other search engines are available!), Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is really important. So what can you do as an editor to improve how your web pages appear in search results? In this post I will share some tips. (more…)
As you may be aware there were some new digital accessibility regulations that came into force last year called the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018. These regulations mean that all public sector bodies (including universities) must ensure websites and mobile applications are more accessible.
There is a project being undertaken to ensure the College fulfils its obligations and to identify those websites and applications that don’t meet the College’s standards.
So what are our standards?
At the College we aim to meet WCAG 2.1 standards (level AA). Most of these standards are to do with the way that the content is structured and delivered in terms of the underlying code in the templates and content types. If you are using the College’s centrally supported websites (such as T4), then most of these things are out of your control as an editor. But, there are some things that are in your control such as how you add images, links and other content to your pages.
With Halloween fast-approaching I thought I would ease any fears and share some tricks and treats to show you how easy it is to improve your content.
A day at the UX Conference in London
Last week, I attended the UX (User Experience) Conference in London. The conference brought together people from different industries across Europe, all with a shared interest in user experience.
There were the usual networking opportunities, but the main focus of the conference was the wide range of training courses covering topics like:
- Managing UX strategy
- Information Architecture
- Content strategy
- Customer journey mapping
- User testing
- Writing for the web
One useful technique to inspire improvements to your content is to carry out a competitor analysis. This involves assessing how direct competitors communicate similar content including:
- tone and language
- key messages
- format preferences
- content types
- content structure (information architecture)
A competitor analysis can range from a full report on several sites or just a few annotated screenshots highlighting good and bad points. The extent of this depends on how much time and resource you have for your new website or redesign project, but it is always worthwhile to do some kind of analysis. One of the main benefits is that it will really help you to break free of the Imperial bubble and think about your content from a different perspective. To illustrate this, I have included a couple of examples of basic competitor analysis that I have done at the bottom of this post.