Develop a brief content and design style guide, then have it approved by
your leadership team and share it with your organization. (Easier
said than done, I know.) Bonus points if you work with your (typically)
print-focused communications person to develop this guide and get his/her
buy-in on creating content for the web.

A style guide sets expectations across the board and helps you when you
need to play they heavy. As you need, you can e-mail folks with a link to
the style guide, ask them to revise, and offer assistance or suggestions if
they want.

Folks are grumpy about this at first, but generally appreciate the overall
strategy to make the website more consistent and professional-looking. It
ain't the wild wild west anymore - our web content is both functional and
part of an overall communications strategy, and we need to treat it
accordingly.

--
Erin White
Web Systems Librarian, VCU Libraries
804-827-3552 | [log in to unmask] | www.library.vcu.edu


On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 9:39 AM, Pikas, Christina K. <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Laughing and feeling your pain... we have a communications person (that's
> her job) who keeps using bold, italics, h1, in pink (yes pink), randomly in
> pages... luckily she only does internal pages, and not external.
>
> You could schedule some writing for the web sessions, but I don't know
> that it will help. You could remove any text formatting... In the end, you
> probably should just do as I do: close the page, breathe deeply, get up and
> take a walk, and get on with other things.
>
> Christina
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Simon LeFranc
> Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2014 7:43 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [CODE4LIB] distributed responsibility for web content
>
> My organization has recently adopted an enterprise Content Management
> System. For the first time, staff across 8 divisions became web authors,
> given responsibility for their division's web pages. Training on the
> software, which has a WYSIWYG interface for editing, is available and with
> practice, all are capable of mastering the basic tools. Some simple style
> decisions were made for them, however, it is extremely difficult to get
> these folks not to elaborate on or improvise new styles.  Examples:
>
>     making text red or another color in the belief that color will draw
> readers' attention    making text bold and/or italic and/or the size of a
> war-is-declared headline (see 1);    using images that are too small to be
> effective    adding a few more images that are too small to be effective
>  attempting to emphasize statements using ! or !! or !!!!!    writing in a
> too-informal tone ("Come on in outta the rain!") [We are a research
> organization and museum.]    feeling compelled to ornament pages with
> clipart, curlicues, et al.    centering everything
> There is no one person in the organization with the time or authority to
> act as editorial overseer. What are some techniques for ensuring that the
> site maintains a clean, professional appearance?
>
> Simon
>
>
>