On the web, content is king. A beautiful design will help Siena stand out, but the design is only as good as the writing and imagery it presents. This document will set guidelines for a consistent writing style. Voice and tone are the two main components of writing style, as explained in Nicely Said: Writing for the Web with Style and Purpose by Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee:

“People often use the words voice and tone interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. Your voice is your company’s public personality. It doesn’t change much from day to day. Like your own individual personality, it comes through in all of your content and influences how people perceive you. On the other hand, your tone changes to fit the situation. While your voice is more about you, your tone is more about your readers and how they feel. Together, your voice and tone make up your writing style.

Voice and Tone Keywords

Communal

When speaking about being at Siena, talking about the community is more than just a noun. The community is an action and an intention of Siena’s, a manifestation of what comes from the people they have brought together. This isn’t an abstraction, it’s a tangible and identifiable element of Siena that is crucial, and it needs to come through when Siena speaks about itself.

Compassionate

Siena’s people bring their warmth and humanity to each other as part of the Siena experience. Engaging with Siena is engaging with caring people who do what they can to serve you, both as an envoy of Siena and as an embody of Siena’s Franciscan values.

Person-centered

Siena isn’t run by bureaucracy or greed, but by a deep focus on people and on serving them. Compassionate reflects how Siena’s people engage with the outside world, but person-centered is focused on Siena’s structure and heart.

Holistic

There is more to creating a whole person than just academic education—and there is a richness that comes from that. Being holistic is about focusing on the whole picture, not leaving your garden to decay while you build your house. Siena looks for that richness, focuses its energy in multiple places, and emphasizes the wholesomeness of a broad perspective.

Joyful

Siena’s spirit shines brightly through its alumni, staff, and students. When Siena talks about its successes, joy subsumes pride. It’s a minor, but noticeable difference. Siena rejoices in the good for its people and the broader community, it doesn’t brag about its accomplishments.

Supportive

This voice and tone keyword comes across as an amalgamation of others—person-centered, communal, and compassionate. Siena looks for what is best for its students and staff, and creates structures and relationships that underpin that success. It looks to help students as individuals, however that help is needed.

Honest

Siena doesn’t need to hide the truth about itself. This is most important when Siena talks about its own value—that it is clear that Siena speaks truthfully about what it provides, and that what it provides is purposeful. The people of Siena carry this value to each other, speaking directly but gently, and providing truth instead of spin.

Grounded

Siena’s work is deeply practical in preparing its graduates for their entire lives. Being a liberal arts school comes with a stigma of frivolity. Moving past that is a combination of being honest and realist about what students need, and what the school can provide for them. Siena has the statistics about the success of its students, and it can make a solid case that what it provides isn’t just valuable, it’s useful and necessary.

As you are well familiar, even the most advanced website isn’t a “set it and forget it” venture. This publication calendar isn’t meant to plan out how you structure your content, but rather to give a general framework to check in on the content regularly—ensuring that sections are updated regularly and that there’s a fresh stream of content flowing into the site. Some of these items may change in frequency as you become more familiar with the site, and find a comfortable rhythm for establishing that it is working well.

Weekly

• Check the events feed for accurate data.
• High level QA checks for directories, resources, and other data listings. (This will trail off over time)
• Create new stories for the site.
• Change featured stories on the News page.
• Change events featured on the homepage.

Monthly

• Assess callout cards on the homepage. Revise or create new ones as necessary. Change sections as necessary.
• Change featured stories on the homepage.

Quarterly

• Change the feature text/link/image.
• Assess high level content strategy by simulating user journeys through the site. Click through articles and features as if a new student, and ensure that there aren’t dead ends.
• Audit course descriptions from the program finder.
• Audit crucial pages for user journeys (Admissions, Financial Aid, Scholarships).

Yearly

• Audit course pages (All content, not just from the listing page).
• Audit departmental pages. Ensure that they link correctly to other areas of the site.
• Plan out broad messaging strategy for the year, especially in regards to the homepage feature.

When building a page, there's no arbitrarily "correct" way to structure your content—only a few best practices.

Global vs. Template Specific Components

Many of the components are specific to a certain template, which means that they aren't available to the entire website, usually because of specific data requirements. Here is a list of global components that can be used on (most) pages.

• WYSIWYG

Building Context

Add visual appeal to the page, bringing in beautiful imagery and statistics.

• Image Header
• Callout Cards
• Media Gallery

Moving Users Between Pages

Create on page navigation to get users to other places and help them understand the site structure.

• Link List
• Topic Row
• Flex Callout

Linking Back to the Main Site

Reference content and information from the main site.

• Related Programs
• Related News
• Featured Event

Getting in Touch

Helping users see who is part of this site section and find someone to talk to.

• Faculty Listing
• Contact Information

Creating a balanced page

The majority of pages on a site like this start with textual content (Entered into the WYSIWYG) and end with a series of more graphical components, like Topic Rows or a Flex Callout or Link List. This page gives the user information, and then gives them the ability to move to similar pages or keep exploring.

When creating longer form pages with more visual variance, it's best to create a page with a visual rhythm, that moves back and forth between blocks of text and graphical elements. Instead of a huge amount of text and then a bunch of visual elements, intersperse the two with each other. Give context, highlight specific points, and create an interplay between graphic and text that keeps the page from feeling like the dreaded "Wall of text".

Capitalization Rules

The names of offices and departments at Siena are capitalized only when the full, official name is used.

e.g. Capitalize

• Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs
• Department of Biology (Biology Department)
• School of Liberal Arts
• Center for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity
• Division of Student Life

Except for languages, such as English, French and Italian, the names of academic disciplines, majors, minors, programs and courses of study are not proper nouns and should not be capitalized. Example: She majored in history and English. The exception to this would be, as Julia indicated, if we are listing these in a callout box or heading where they would stand alone.

Defining SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of creating a website or web page to have markup and content quality that is optimized for search engines like Google, Bing, and other major competitors.

Good SEO practices have the ability to increase a site’s page ranking and search engine visibility. As a marketing strategy, SEO can provide better placement within the search results, thus providing higher levels of exposure to outside audiences seeking related content without the use of paid advertising.

Good content makes for good SEO

Create relevant content with good structure

This is the primary practice that will result in better indexing. Not only does having good content make your users happy, but it also lets search engines know that your site provides the answers and content that users are looking for.

Content should go from general to specific—like a funnel.

Having a modest amount of relevant content that supports the thesis of each page will do more for you than having a large quantity of non-relevant content. Search engines prefer well-organized, well-written content—just like your users.

SEO in practice at Siena

Use keywords wisely: weave them into content

Include primary keywords in the page title (H1) and keyword-rich phrases in the copy at least twice. Use secondary keywords in page headlines and content where appropriate. Try not to think of keywords as things you have to force into your content. They should be a natural expression of what you are conveying—and what your visitors will naturally be searching for.

Not only should your keywords be in your headers and your metadata, but also in your on-page content. This helps from both an SEO and a user experience standpoint. The content on your website should match the search query that got them there, which is why aligning metadata with on-page content is so important. Use natural language, but weave your keywords in where appropriate. It can also be helpful to start the first and last paragraph of a webpage with your top keyword for the page.

The H1 stands alone

There should technically only be one H1 in your content, the title of the page. The rest of the headings should be H2 and higher, i.e., H3, H4, and so on.

Use headers

While more content is better, you want that content to be easy to digest. Having 500 words all crowded into one paragraph would not be ideal. That’s why you should break up content with section headers. This also makes it easy for users to find what they’re looking for since many will first scan through the headers on the page. Headers are also important for search engine visibility. These headers are part of what’s ranked via Google’s algorithm, which is why it’s also important that your headers contain keywords.

Use smart URLs

The URL should clearly indicate what the page is about. A redesign is a great time to do a content audit and update URLs to more readable text with 301 redirects.

Leverage quality media

Images and media not only create a more engaging experience for your visitors, but they also contribute to the content being more useful and valuable. Use clear and descriptive alt tags, file names, and captions (when appropriate).

Keep it scannable

Following the outline model for your content, make it simple for your visitors to scan the page headings to know where to find what they are looking for. Good news, this makes search engines happy too.

Minimum 250 words per page

Content helps increase your search engine visibility: you’re also thus answering more questions. When users land on your website, you want them to be able to find the information they’re looking for.

Match user expectations

The above is also why it’s important that your on-page content matches your metadata. This way, when someone clicks on a result for your website in Google, the page they are taken to matches the information presented in that search engine result.

Use internal links

Internal links are a key component of on-page content. They give you the opportunity to promote other pages on your site and they also create a positive user experience by making it easy for visitors to learn more about a certain topic. That being said, you don’t want to overdo it. It’s important to think about what anchor text you use as well, as Google and other search engines take this into account. You want to be sure that each link’s anchor text contains a keyword.

End with a call-to-action

When a user is done reading a page, you want to make it easy for them to take the next step. That’s why you should always include a call-to-action at the end of any page’s content.

Basics of W3C Standard HTML

Know your headers

Header tags not only provide a visual hierarchy for your readers, but they also let Google and other search engines know you are starting a new chunk of information.

There are six levels of header tags (H1 to H6). The page title should always be H1 and respective subheadings should gradually increase based on their position in the outline.

H1 is the most important item on the page

Use it sparingly, and preferably only for the title of the page. Don’t shy away from using the H2-H6 header tags: these are just as important for giving search engines clues about the supplementary content your page contains.

Next most important is the first paragraph

Followed by H1, the introductory paragraph—in an HTML p tag—provides further context to Google about what the page is about. Use this paragraph to summarize the contents of the page with relevant and useful keywords.

Think of Google like a real person

Site visitors are unlikely to read whole pages of text unless they know that the content pertains to exactly what they are looking for. Use clear, descriptive, and keyword-rich text for page titles.

Use clear, keyword-rich navigation titles

Make sure that all navigation titles take advantage of keywords whenever possible and are written in clear language that does not rely on insider terms.

Make sure link text is easy to understand

Use clear and descriptive terms when creating anchor text within page content. The clearer the language the better it is for SEO, e.g., Instead of “Learn more,” say “Learn more about Nuclear Fuel.”

Make a list, check it twice

Ordered/numbered and un-ordered/bulleted lists are great for organizing information as well as giving Google a clue that a group of core content is about to be served up. Your site visitors will appreciate the easy, scannable nature of content in list form.

Use alt text on images

Search engine spiders and people using screen readers cannot see what is being shown in images. Based on W3C standards, each image is required to have alternative text, or “alt text.” Use the alt text to clearly describe the image content.

Use naming conventions for image files

Image file names give search engines and screen readers more contextual clues about the image’s content. Naming conventions for image files, along with the alt attribute text, should be well thought-out to lend clarity and context.

Provide titles and transcripts for videos

Including video transcripts on separate pages does aid in search engine optimization of the content, but will not drive traffic directly to the page on which the video is mainly featured.

Metadata

Defining metadata

Metadata is information placed into the HTML that does not display on the page, but is visible to search engines.

A little metadata history

Metadata originally was used by search engines to determine the relevance of a page’s content. Search engines' over-reliance on this data resulted in wide exploitation, allowing web pages to lie about their contents and diluting the usefulness of search results. In response, search engines learned to index the page’s content instead of only its metadata.

Where metadata is now

Although meta keywords and meta descriptions still exist and should still be taken into consideration, they are not the most important SEO practice that an organization can use to boost its SEO.

What it’s used for

The meta description is sometimes used by Google and other search engines as the description that displays on a search results page (SERP). Think of it like the excerpt or blurb that summarizes the content on the page and uses relevant keywords.

Metadata guidelines

Keep your meta description between 150 and 160 characters long if possible, anything longer is truncated by the search engine. Something to consider, Google will sometimes take an actual paragraph from your site in place of the meta description if it better suits the specific search needs of the visitor or if the metadata is missing.

Metadata ≠ SEO

Google has publicly announced that it no longer uses metadata descriptions for site ranking. Bing has announced that it uses them to demote a site within its rankings if they suspect keyword stuffing—where sites put large amounts of irrelevant keywords in metadata fields.

The keywords that are determined to be useful should, more importantly, be used throughout the site in logical yet focused key places, e.g., within page titles, navigation titles, and introductory paragraphs.

In short: metadata is an important element of your website content, but it is only a piece.

Optimizing Title Tags

Format and length are the two biggest components to optimizing title tags.

Optimal format

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name

According to industry testing and experience, the closer to the start of the title tag a keyword is, the more helpful it will be for ranking—and the more likely a user will be to click through from search results. Title tags should include the primary keyword for that page at the beginning, followed by the secondary keyword. Sometimes, there will only be room for the primary keyword. That being said, you always want to include the brand name at the end of the title tag, for brand recognition.

Optimal length

Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag or as many characters as will fit into a 600-pixel display. Titles that extend past the 600-pixel display will be truncated and unable to be fully read. If the title is too long, engines will show an ellipsis to indicate that a title tag has been cut off. When writing title tags, you can use the tool below, which will show you an example of how the title tag, in conjunction with the meta description, will appear in a SERP. This is helpful for gauging length. https://www.portent.com/serp-preview-tool

Consider readability

It's vital to think about the entire user experience when you're creating your title tags, in addition to optimization and keyword usage. The title tag is a new visitor's first interaction with your brand when they find it in a search result; it should reflect the page’s topic in an easy-to-consume manner.

DO NOT keyword stuff

While naturally working one or two keywords into your title is important, you don’t want to sacrifice readability for keyword stuffing. Keep it simple.

The benefits of blogging

Search engines love fresh content

Updating your content frequently means that your site is indexed more regularly while also giving a bonus to your site’s relevance. Keep this in mind when publishing stories about important site topics, and provide relevant links from those stories in the site at large.

Useful content works

Having posts that relate to topics your potential site users are looking for will provide Siena with the potential for more visible search results.

Smart URLs have an impact

News article URLs often reflect the title of the page, providing a double dose of keyword opportunities for site traffic. Titling your content appropriately is vital.

Share your blog posts across various social media platforms

This will invite traffic to your blog and website. Social media sources like Facebook and Twitter are powerful ways to promote your content, and content from them (not hidden behind privacy settings) is also highly indexed by search engines.

Realizing Success

Maintaining SEO awareness in every piece of content that you publish will create improved results over time.

It is imperative that all stakeholders are on the same page about how to leverage SEO best practices. We recommend creating a governance structure and a system of checkpoints that passes each piece of content through a filter, e.g., the review of page titles, the use of keywords, and image alt tags.

Keep in mind that anything that goes up on the site must be managed and maintained. Content owners should strive to populate the site with better content—not more content—and should be prepared to maintain that content.

Don’t let rules and guidelines become a hinderance, though.

At the end of the day, it is people you are trying to communicate with

The best way to do that is to be honest and authentic. If everyone contributing to Siena's online initiatives can embrace that approach, then the entire site and online presence will thrive!

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web. More specifically, Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web. — World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Web accessibility encompasses all disabilities that affect access to the Web, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities. — World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Web accessibility is top of mind for all of us.

Everyone wants to do it well and no one wants to be called out for doing it poorly—and the difference between those two ends of the spectrum isn’t always as clear as it could be.

Beyond the technical requirements and process, building accessible websites is just right thing to do—everyone should be able to get the full value and utility out of your website regardless of the abilities they have.

WCAG 2.0 is a stable, reference-able technical standard. It has 12 guidelines that are organized under 4 principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. For each guideline, there are testable success criteria, which are at three levels: A, AA, and AAA.” - WC3 website

Core Principles of WCAG 2.0

Perceivable

Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive. Detailed Guidelines. For example, captioning your videos so deaf and hard-of-hearing users can understand them fully.

Operable

User interface components and navigation must be operable. Detailed Guidelines. For example: using the tab key on your keyboard must help you move between navigation items in a sensible sequence, which is controllable via code.

Understandable

Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable. Detailed Guidelines. For example: your navigation should be understandable by most audiences; avoid using confusing acronyms.

Robust

Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies. Detailed Guidelines. For example: use appropriate tags so both assistive technologies and future user agents could apply them.

Ongoing Accessibility Compliance Checklist

1. Create an operating budget and accessibility working group that:

• Engages with developers and content creators on larger scale web content projects that add to your institution’s digital ecosystem
• Stays on top of evolving web accessibility trends and issues
• Contributes to decisions on policy, training, and measurement related to web accessibility  

2. Create a clear set of instructions and training that cover the common repeatable tasks content creators will need to keep in mind:

• Transcribing video content
• Writing descriptive content for images
• H tags for headlines are properly ordered
• Avoiding acronyms 

3. Formulate a toolset and schedule for scanning and assessing the health of the website.

• We recommend bi-weekly reports to stay on top of a swiftly moving target utilizing a tool like pa11y
• These regular reports should be shared with the working group
• Additionally, there should be a high-level report of any significant findings as part of annual reporting to leadership

4. Set up web accessibility training refreshers for existing content managers and contributors at regular intervals.

5. Create onboarding materials and training for for new content managers and contributors.