What is best practice?
Best practice is about making sure that the user experience and journey is the best that it can be.
Focus is given to applying current industry standards around content, structure, navigation, imagery, interactivity, functionality, and the overall user experience.
The University of Otago web policy
Here's how your content can help your visitors find what they are looking for in the least amount of time possible.
Homepage
The page that most people get hung up on. Remember this is only one way into your site, not the only way. The homepage exists primarily for two purposes: way-finding and getting your visitors to do something (calls to action). Content should reflect this and could include some/all of the following:
- How to get to other parts of the site, easily and efficiently
- Calls to action, eg. recruiting students, survey participants etc.
- Points of difference
- Activities - events, conferences, seminars, performances
- News
- Research highlights
A brief description of what the site is about should be on the homepage, put the more detailed information on the About us page.
See the NNG article on the importance of About us pages.
Headings
Headings are lighthouses for your content, guiding visitors through your pages. The power of well constructed, informative and meaningful headings should not be underestimated.
Of all the headings on a webpage, the most important and hardest working is the H1:
- It is usually the first item visitors see
- Provides context about the content/website
- Search engines give them priority and usually display them for complex sites
The H1 heading should indicate your most important topic, with the other H(eading) tags as subtopics. The aim of the H1 is to inform visitors (prospective students, researchers, et al.) about the web page content and what they can expect to find on the site.
Do not use the H1 to as a welcome - as tempting as that it. It wastes your best opportunity for juicy keywords that work well with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). These will help your people to find you!
Use headings correctly and strategically (an <h1> followed by an <h2> then an <h3> etc.) to ensure that your website content is well-organised and easily interpreted by all visitors. Users of assistive technology use headings to navigate and discover content.
Headings should be long enough to give readers the meaning of the information that follows. They are the best thing you can do to make your page scannable, which is extremely useful for skim reading visitors and most visitors skim.
Further reading on how little users actually read (NN Group)
Put your headings to work
To help you write the best H1 that you can, use the theory of an elevator pitch to construct your H1.
Imagine you have just 30 seconds to explain to a stranger what your department/division/research centre is all about and what and/or why you are the best choice:
- What would you tell them?
- What is your department/division/research centre about?
- What are your strengths, what makes you better/different from your competition?
Write it down, say it out loud, try it out on a colleague, if you were a first-time visitor do you understand the heading's message?
This should help you realise the importance of having clear and informative headings (and content) - and also the difficulties of attracting the attention of your intended audience/s.
Here are a couple of examples to get you going:
- Unipol Recreation Services offers a huge choice of recreational activities, including cardio and weights, sports halls, group fitness, outdoor rental, social sport and outdoor adventures
- Xero - Online accounting software for your small business
- Dropbox - Your stuff, anywhere
SEO/metadata
If you make the page easy to scan by humans and search engines alike, search engines such as Google will reward your page with a higher ranking.
Always use the heading styles provided and in the correct order—regardless of which heading is your favourite (e.g. H2 before H3, H3 before H4 etc).
Also screen readers use the heading structure to navigate content.
By using headings (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) correctly and strategically, the content of your website will be well-organised and easily interpreted by screen readers.
Alt tags
The alt text describes what is in the image. The alt text is also used by screen readers, to tell the blind and visually impaired people what is on the image.
Each image should have alt text. Not just for SEO purposes but also because visually impaired people otherwise won't know what the image is.
Good alt text improves your site's accessibility.
Well-chosen images strengthen your messages and get people to pay attention. Images should have good alt attributes: alt tags and title tags strengthen the message for search engine spiders and improve the accessibility of your website.
Every time you have an image in your text, the alt tag should describe what's on the image. Screen readers for the blind and visually impaired will read out this text and thus make your image accessible.
Web writing
Our people
It is preferable to use titles rather than individual names in the navigation as staff do change, however unlikely that may seem at present. This means that only the page content would require updating. We only really use individual's names in the instance of scholarships and the like.