Digital officers Katie Manktelow and Hazel Jackson have pair written their top tips for pair writing.
As the saying goes, two heads are better than one. Pair writing is two (or more) people writing together. Introduced by agile software developers who were writing code, it’s now common practice in content design teams including our own. We use this approach to write copy for the website.
Continue reading: Pair writing: Why we love it
We’ve been investing significantly in an intranet for University staff and postgraduate research students (PGRs). Previously our intranet content was scattered across our external website, seriously old internal content management systems, wikis and random crevices that only staff who’ve been at the University for decades would be able to find.
As we’ve just moved it out of beta and into live I thought it was a good opportunity to detail the design principles we’ve been using to inform its development.
It’s important to add we’re still at the early stages of a long journey. There’s a large roadmap of development ahead. But we believe that by sticking with these principles we can continue to build an intranet that will prove invaluable to all our staff and PGRs.
Our previous accessibility blog post explored some of the barriers that people face when they read online content. Barriers that stop people from being able to use the content.
Creating clear and accessible content has always been important. It means everyone can use and understand it.
However, as more and more services move online, it’s even more important that we reduce these barriers. It’s even more important to create clear and accessible content.
Here are seven things every content professional needs to do to make their content accessible.Continue reading: Seven things you need to do to make your content accessible
Jeremy Torrance, head of digital comms, reflects on our recent two-day content design workshop.
If you’re producing content for websites and you haven’t heard of content design you really should take a long hard look in the mirror. Content design – creating content that’s focused on what the user needs to know rather than what publishers want to tell them – is a skill every content producer needs to have.
It’s not easy and does require something of a change in mindset. So to get our content folk on the path to enlightenment we brought in Hinrich von Haaren from Content Design London for a content design workshop.
After the session I asked all the attendees to share one or two things they learned from it. Here they are.
Digital officer Charlotte Brewer on why accessibility in web content should never be an afterthought.
It’s really easy to create content, but it’s also really easy to create content that’s hard to use.
It is easy to assume if I can use it, it’s fine.
This assumption ignores the fact that other people may not be fine with your content. It ignores people with a disability or cognitive condition who might struggle to use your content.
This is why accessibility is so important. Put simply, accessibility is about making sure everyone can use the content you create.
When I first started my career, I honestly didn’t think about accessibility. I am a native English speaker, with no disabilities or diagnosed learning conditions. The thought that anyone might struggle with the content I created didn’t cross my mind. Continue reading: If our content’s not accessible it’s not usable
