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Our monthly tip sheet for content authors and site owners
May 2023
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You spent hours, days, even weeks writing the content for your website. You weighed every word choice. You consulted with your subject matter experts. You made sure it complied with state and federal law and internal policies. You carefully curated educational resources on the technical aspects of your programs. You made passionate arguments, supported by facts and detail.
And your audience read less than a tenth of what you wrote.
Because people use websites differently than other written documents, writing for the web requires a different approach. To create content that connects with your visitors, check out our newly revised and expanded guide for Writing Web Content in the IOP Content Strategy repository.
Topics include:
- How visitors use websites;
- Understanding your audience’s needs and preferences;
- Qualities of good web content;
- Principles of plain language;
- Types of words and phrases to avoid; and
- Commonly confused or misused words and phrases.
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Agencies, boards, and commissions with IOP websites have access to a shared Getty Images Premium Access account. Getty images allows you to enhance your content with eye-catching, professional photos, illustrations, and videos.
The IOP UX Service team recently published a Getty Images User Guide. The resource includes information on the intended and appropriate use of Getty Images. You’ll also find guidelines to make the most of the shared resources and tips for finding the perfect visuals to complement your content.
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IOP gives you a suite of self-service tools to help you build, maintain, evaluate, and update your content. But we’re also just an email away when you need assistance.
Our help desk system uses a blend of AI and human review to turn your email into a customer support ticket and route it to the most appropriate staff to help you.
We’ve added instructions to the Content Author Training Repository for submitting a customer service ticket. Read them for tips on creating tickets that may help us deliver quicker, more efficient solutions for you.
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IOP provides a range of templates to help content authors create engaging pages. Some templates are specifically tailored to a particular type of content or area of your site.
Often, content authors may wish to use or re-use content that was originally in one format or site area in a different way. For example, you may want to convert a news article to a permanent page in another part of your site. Or you may want to change a resource to a data source to add a table of information that your visitors can sort and filter.
You can easily these and other transformations by changing the authoring template of the content. Applying a new authoring template adds new features, removes unnecessary features, and converts existing content to the appropriate areas of the new template. It also updates the presentation template, which determines what your visitor sees.
Find step-by-step instructions for changing the authoring template in the Content Author Training Repository.
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The @OHGov account on Twitter points 13,000+ followers to content of interest on State of Ohio websites. If you have new, timely, or popular content on your site that you would like us to share with our audience, please send the URL of the content you'd like featured, along with a brief description of why it should be featured and when, to portal.manager@das.ohio.gov. |
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