A while ago, I lead a discussion during the NTEN WordPress Community monthly call about helping editors make consistent web pages. (We have monthly calls, and they are free to join! If you work for a nonprofit and use WordPress, join our group for good discussions and community!)
My thoughts were a little thrown-together, but I found it very clarifying and the group seemed to appreciate them too. So let’s turn it into a blog post!
View the Presentation
It ain’t pretty, but it works! Here’s a link to view in its own tab.
Reasons for Consistency
In the context of our conversation, “consistency” referred to the visual design of pages, how content is written, and how editors can control page design and formatting.
It helped to start by examining the underlying goals we’re trying to meet. These were the three that jumped out to me:
- Branding: Consistent visual and writing styles strengthen the organization’s brand and visitors trust the site
- User Experience: Consistent formatting and layout support visitors in navigating the site and extracting information from the site
- Transparency and clarity: Setting content and layout standards encourages editors to be thorough in providing details for things like events and programs
These may seem very basic and simple, but if site editors are not fully aware of and bought-in to these goals, then encouraging and enforcing consistency will not go well. (And I can promise you that I’ve worked with plenty of people who would not agree to all of these goals, usually preferring their own opinions and aesthetic preferences.)
Ways to Support Consistency on Websites
Presenting is a great way to clarify your own thoughts, and here’s where this presentation really helped me. I found that the primary ways of supporting consistency broke down into three main categories.
1. Governance (aka People solutions aka “The Carrot”)
- Set expectations around consistency and standards early on for website editors
- Provide clear training that includes standards and rationale for consistency
- Create editorial workflows and tools like checklists and review-for-approval processes that support consistency
- Embrace feedback improve standards based on real-world needs and visitor feedback
2. Guardrails (aka Tech solutions aka “The Stick”)
- Generate automated warnings around issues when possible for things like contrast errors (I love the Editoria11y plugin that is an “accessibility spellcheck”)
- Limit choices such as a brand-approved color palette or preset scale of available fonts sizes (e.g. “Large” rather than 31px)
- Use forms for highly detailed content to produce consistent levels of detail
- Require fields and other elements—going as far as preventing publishing without details
3. Governance + Tech (aka “Pave the cowpaths”)
- Make it easiest to be consistent
- Build attractive default styles into all page content so things look good out of the box
- Use starter templates and preset page layouts for quick page creation
- Use “blocks” and “patterns” for quickly building parts of a page with attractive layouts
Tailoring solutions to fit any organization
Almost every point above can be adapted to any organization. Of course, the details will vary based on the number of site editors, the experience of those editors, the size of a website, and the amount of new content being added over time.
When it comes to how I build WordPress websites for my nonprofit clients, I put a tremendous amount of thought into all three methods of producing consistent websites. While it continues to evolve, I have found that the default WordPress block editor can be a very good tool for supporting the “cow path” solutions that enable some editorial flexibility while rewarding editors for using attractive, default styles.
This is one of my favorite topics to talk about with developers and site editors, so if you have other ideas for how to support and encourage website consistency, I want to hear about them!