Who writes for our website?
Each of our departments is responsible for adding, maintaining and improving the content on their own pages on our website.
The digital team offer training to officers in each department on how to use our systems and how to write for the web to ensure consistency and aim for content that gets it right, first time, every time for our visitors.
We also provide information for the website and work with departments to help them improve their pages through understanding visitor feedback, statistics, good online practice and a range of other tools.
Our house style
We have a style guide for the website to ensure consistency and to help us make sure our information is accessible and usable.
We ask everyone who will be adding information to the website to follow the guidance when they're creating web content.
In addition, the digital team make checks on all information before it is published to the website to ensure it meets our standards.
Training and support
We run two types of training for adding information to the website.
Content management system - this training enables staff to use the software in order to add information to the website. It also introduces accessibility and usability to them.
Writing for the web - this encourages staff to create information specifically for the web and not just to reproduce information prepared for other purposes.
It also introduces our house style.
The digital team support staff in their work adding information to the website by offering refresher training, telephone, email and face-to-face support as well as advice on creating great web pages.
Readability
We encourage the use of plain English on our website and wherever possible cut out jargon.
In some cases we also use the 'Flesch Reading Ease' system to measure how easy the information on our website is to understand.
This system analyses web pages and calculates a score of between 1 and 100 - the nearer to 100 the score, the easier the information is to understand.
We aim for all our content to score 50 or above on the scale, along with fitting with our house style.
Content audits
The digital team carry out regular audits of the information on the website and assess it on different criteria.
This includes:
- readability
- accessibility
- usability
- consistency with house style
- currency
The team will then work with authors to improve areas of information where needed.
Document, images and multimedia content
Most of the documents on our website are available in Portable Document Format (PDF) and in certain cases also available as Word, Excel or Powerpoint files.
We also ensure that where images or other multimedia content are used on our site they are added in an accessible and usable way.
You can find out more about the accessibility standards we work towards.
If you have any questions about how information is added to our website or the standards we follow please contact us.