Author: Elena Talanker
Front-line digital responders - pay attention to detail
Three months into 2020 and we are living in a new reality. Almost overnight everything got switched to digital world, making work of the state agencies digital teams very visible and extremely important for the North Carolina constituencies.
Our team actively supports Digital Commons platform websites and is assisting agency web teams in their daily work. As you do the important work of keeping people informed, it is more important than ever to improve your visitor experience. Taking time to pay attention to detail can reduce frustration and increase trust. To help, we've pulled out a few of our best practices for you to keep in mind as you add and update content.
Think mobile first
More than 50% of the website traffic on Digital Commons platform comes from the mobile devices. But wait, mobile readers are looking at tiny little screens. Always check your page for the mobile view by using device simulation in Chrome DevTools or by resizing your desktop screen to mobile size by dragging right side of the page to the left.
Chunk it up!
With growing amount of information on the web people are not reading content thoroughly, people are looking for fast answers. To help site visitors quickly scan the page:
- Make paragraphs shorter and use lots of headings. Employ active verbs.
- Always clean formatting, it helps to read faster.
- Use appropriate headings order: Heading 2 is always first, followed by the Heading 3, et cetera. Do not skip heading numbers.
Take it out of PDF?
Since PDFs must be downloaded to be read, they are getting fewer and fewer views—especially from mobile site visitors. Place content important to site visitors on a web page to help them find what they need faster.
Add it to the Menu
With the new practice recently adopted by Digital Commons platform that new pages could be created only by the website managers, it makes it so much easier to keep your site organized. Don’t forget to add new pages to the menu to help give these pages breadcrumbs
Don’t know how to do something on the platform?
Don’t hesitate - post your question on the Digital Commons Content Ninjas Team site to get a response from the experts.
We also love to see you learning platform tips and tricks be sure to share those successes on the Team site as well.
More tips
In addition to the tips listed here review a complete listing in our:
Checklist for Creating New Content
Stay safe and healthy,
Digital Solutions team