Blog Guidelines

Writing Blogs for the TalkIT Website

Here are some points on writing blogs for the TalkIT website. Writing and updating them is an important part of how we contact our audience. We want keep the content quality and presentation style high so visitors return.Blog We also want to standardise the layout so it is consistent across the site. Take a look at existing blogs on the site. In this way TalkIT will have a recognizable style. The good news is the WordPress CMS has many good features that help create blogs. These are, of course, guidelines and not rules. As always use your own judgement. Please let me have any questions on this!  

Content

  1. Think about how the blog will appeal to our audience and communicate our values
  2. Write about the topics that will interest our audience
  3. Spell & grammar check content using MS Word, the paste text in to the CMS editor
  4. Include 300 to 500 words in blog
  5. Include 3 to 6 images in blog to add appeal
  6. Copy images to the media library, but edit filename, title, description & Alt Text to improve SEO, etc.
  7. Include titles and subtitles in the blog, formatted with heading 2 to heading 5 in Design view
  8. Break text in to short sentences and paragraphs for  improved readability
  9. Use bulleted lists when appropriate for  improved readability
  10. Add full stop (.) to end of text in bulleted lists when multiple sentences are used
  11. Bold selected single words for emphasis but not several adjacent words
  12. Use words for numbers from one to nine then digits from 10 upwards
  13. Include links to other parts of TalkIT website, but to retain visitors add only a few links to other sites
  14. Right justify and wrap text around images, rather than just centring them on blank lines
  15. Make the links and images open in a separate browser window to retain visitors
  16. Credit sources at the bottom of blog to demonstate our honesty
  17. The blogs are copyright to TalkIT, as stated in the contact page
  18. Add author name and date written  at the bottom of blog
  19. Change the date and time of the blog as titles are browsed in date order
  20. Categorised the page as a blog in CMS
  21. Add SEO settings to blog page in CMS
  22. Initially, save page as draft, then email me so I can approve before publishing
  23. Enjoy being creative!
 
Here are points on answering social media questions. Since there are 1000’s of questions on the web, we do not have time to answer all of these. So here are TalkIT guidelines on answering social media questions.
 
  1. We will answer only questions that are from our target audience.
  2. The ultimate aim of answering questions is to get visitors back to the website
  3. We do not have time to answer detailed technical questions
  4. We can answer more generic questions about learning technology
  5. If possible we want to use existing content on the website, there is lots
  6. The best way of doing this is to copy, but if necessary adapt the answer
  7. Answers can include links to relevant pages on the website

David Ringsell

2015

Image http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/

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