enterprise-europe.co.uk content guide

A website style guide is a tool to ensure brand identity, professionalism and consistency on your website.

It helps you structure your story, and defines the writing style, voice, typographical and visual elements that should be used.

Content is King – 3 C’s

•! Credibility - All content for the the site must be created / edited fresh, not just copied and pasted.

•! Copyright – Check and seek all the necessary permissions before publishing.

•! Citing references: Here’s a useful instructional guide.

Writing Your Piece – 3 F’s

•! For who? – Write with a specific audience in mind. Who are you targeting with your news/event/article?

•! Frontload - People read in an ‘F shape’ online so the first couple of words of a title are really important. Likewise, a concise abstract that explains the whole story is just as important. If you use Word, remove formatting before pasting into the CMS.

•! Findable - Write for Google with optimised headlines, body text, meta descriptions and alt text. Google Trends and Topsy are both really easy tools to help you find keywords. Using them will make your piece more findable online.

Style – 3 V’s

•! Voice - Write in the third person - using “he”, “she” or “it” and not “I”, “we” or “you”. – no jargon. Avoid acronyms and abbreviations. Use bold (sparingly) – no italics or underlining,

o! bullet points, and o! white space help the eye navigate the page o! Use sentence case, never UPPER CASE and no need to Capitalise the

Beginning of Each Word unless GOV.UK’s style guide says so. •! Visuals - Every post should use good imagery. Don’t need to amend the pixel

dimension, do need to add alt text. If using thumbnails, add a bit of padding (white space) in the advanced tab.

o! Headings. Make sure the article title is selected as H2 and subheadings as H3 in the editor. That’s important for google.

•! Very good Links – Email and social need to link directly to the article and it’s important other websites link direct to your article too. This is good old fashioned PR and important for google.