After you’ve organised your website structure, you can start planning the content you want to put on each page. It’s always a good idea to check if your organisation has any guidelines that will influence how you write.
Guidelines
Style guide
We recommend following the GOV.UK style guide.
Lots of organisations publish style guides online. Some other useful examples to explore are:
You may also find it useful to create a list of terms that your organisation uses regularly. For example, the NHS A to Z guide for health writing gives really clear guidance on what terms work best when talking to people about their health.
Tone of voice
Tone of voice guides are similar to style guides but rather than focus on the terms you use, they outline the way that you want to communicate with your audience. Is it friendly, formal, reassuring, direct? Having a clear idea of this will help when you write content for your site.
Some good examples include:
- University of Dundee voice and tone guide
- NHS England tone of voice guidelines
- Girlguiding UK tone of voice
Understanding user needs
One of the most important tasks to do before you start producing any content is to define what your users want or are looking for when they visit your site.
Understanding what people need to know (as opposed to what you think they might want to know or what you want to tell them), will help you keep your content concise and effective.
Find out more about working with user needs from Content Design London.
Clear and simple content
Making your content clear and simple isn’t just good for your users, it will help improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) so more people can find and read your work.
Writing for the web
GOV.UK has some really clear and helpful guidance on how to write well for your audience. It includes information about how people read online and how to structure your content with things like subheadings, bullet points, short sentences and paragraphs to improve readability.
Plain English
A big part of making your content clearer is to use plain English where possible. There are lots of free guides available on the Plain English Campaign website. It’s also useful to check the words to avoid on GOV.UK list, which has been developed using Plain English principles.
Readability
The easy-to-use Hemingway Editor online tool helps you check the readability of your content. It also highlights any difficult parts of your text and gives suggestions of how to make it simpler.
The Readability Guidelines website has a handy checklist on how to make your web content easier for people to read.
Inclusive language
Find out more about words to use when writing about disability in this inclusive language guide from the Cabinet Office and Disability Unit.
Checking your content
You should always check your work before publishing it. If you have a colleague, ask them for feedback on what you have produced.
Use this checklist to gauge the quality of what you have written:
- Page purpose – is it clear who this page is aimed at, does it contain up to date information and offer next steps for users to take? Read more about user needs.
- Structure – make sure that the most important information is shown up front, that you have broken content down into short paragraphs and added sub-headings. Find more tips on structuring your content.
- Simple language – have you kept the language simple and sentences short? Find out more about writing for the web.
- Visual content – check that you have alt text for your images, transcripts, captions and audio descriptions for your videos and descriptions of any diagrams and tables. Read more about accessibility.
- Links – are your links clear, concise and descriptive? Read more about writing link content on the Readability Guidelines website.
- Titles – have you front-loaded your titles with the most important words first and used sentence case? Find out more about writing titles.
Managing your content
Creating and publishing content is not a one-off task. It’s important to make sure your site is up to date and is performing well.
Define key performance indicators (KPIs)
It’s hard to judge how your site is performing without setting out some KPIs. In commercial sectors, these are usually based on converting users into buyers but you may need to look at more quality-focused goals.
The 2 most important elements of setting KPIs are:
- holding discussions with colleagues to define what measures are most relevant to your organisation
- ensuring you have put in the appropriate mechanisms to measure and report on them (for example, if you want to track user satisfaction, have you put feedback options in place?)
Find out more about using KPIs to measure content from Content Strategy Inc.
Review content
When you publish something on the website, add a note in your calendar to review the page again in 6 months or a year to check that the content is still needed and relevant.
Define content management processes
Make sure everyone knows what they are expected to do to help keep the website up to date and accessible. This will make updating tasks simpler and also enable a smoother handover if anyone leaves. It is worth defining in detail who:
- owns the content on each page of your website
- contributes to creating and updating pages
- contributes to creating and updating documents
Content curation
Projects end, documents are published but what happens next? As content grows over time, sites can become more unwieldy, harder to manage and very importantly, more difficult for users to find and navigate.
Think about how you can signpost work that is no longer current or may no longer be relevant. The National Archives should have captured previous versions of your website so you can redirect users to historic content.