I'm about to start the process of tidying up our old articles to fit our new theme, but before I do that, I thought it would be a good idea to lay down some guidelines/requirements for those articles - and anything we publish in the future - to adhere to.
This list is subject to change. I encourage everyone to speak up if they disagree with something. I am not anointing myself The Lifestream Content Filter here; I'd like there to be a consensus on these issues.
I'll also add that while this list might look a bit daunting, we shouldn't expect all our authors to know how to do all of it. Newspapers, magazines and major websites all employ editors to handle the bulk of this stuff, and we can follow a similar model so that our authors can get on with their most important job - creating content.
Titles:
Article text:
Links:
In-line images:
Featured images:
The excerpt:
Tags and categories:
Search engine optimisation:
This list is subject to change. I encourage everyone to speak up if they disagree with something. I am not anointing myself The Lifestream Content Filter here; I'd like there to be a consensus on these issues.
I'll also add that while this list might look a bit daunting, we shouldn't expect all our authors to know how to do all of it. Newspapers, magazines and major websites all employ editors to handle the bulk of this stuff, and we can follow a similar model so that our authors can get on with their most important job - creating content.
Titles:
- Should fit onto:
- one line on the article page itself,
- two lines when it's the top story on the front page, and
- three lines everywhere else.
I've tested and tweaked font sizes extensively to try and make these limits equivalent to one another. The result is that your title should be at most 60 characters. 60 is also the recommended character limit for search engine optimisation (SEO). - Should be in sentence case. This means that, aside from proper nouns, only the first letter of the title is capitalised. Sentence case is:
- easier to read than title case,
- more consistent than title case,
- recommended by web style guides, and
- easy to change to title case later if we ever change our mind, while the reverse conversion is not so easy.
This sentence uses sentence case (which you should also use). This Sentence Uses Title Case (Which You Should Avoid). If the article is about an original Lifestream creation, you can consider it a proper noun and use title case. For example, "The Lifestream Podcast" with a capital P. - Should be in the present tense with minimal articles, as is standard journalistic practice. Example: "Square Enix publishes new game" rather than "Square Enix published a new game". This only applies to news reports; you have more freedom with editorials, for example.
- Should use American English for consistency. Your actual articles can use whichever variant of English you prefer.
Article text:
- Should start off with a summary paragraph, in bold, where appropriate. This is known as a standfirst. It should contain a brief summary or introduction to the article, and it should be bold to make it typographically distinct from the rest of the text. I'm not hard-coding this into our CSS because there are times when it's not necessary. Use your discretion.
- Should contain no arbitrary styling. You're welcome to use Wordpress's HTML editor instead of the visual editor, but don't use it to add any CSS, inline or otherwise. If you aren't happy with how your article looks when you preview it, talk to me or another editor and we'll help you to make it look better in a futureproof way.
Links:
- Should not contain a "target" attribute. At present, lots of links contain the target="_blank" attribute. I understand the logic - if a TLS visitor clicks on a link, particularly an external one, we'd rather they open it in a new window so that they'll still have TLS open in the background. Unfortunately, this is a very outdated practice that breaks all sorts of web guidelines, the most important one being that users should be given as much control of their browser as possible. If they want to open a new tab, they can choose to do so for themselves by middle-clicking or right-clicking and selecting "open in new tab"; we shouldn't force that behaviour on them.
- Should hide the actual URL. I've noticed that our podcast posts include the text, "Just visit http://www.thelifestream.net/forums". This is wrong on two levels: first, it includes "www.", which we don't normally use, because it can break cookies; and second, it looks sloppy. The URL should be in the hyperlink, obviously, but visitors should see "Just visit the Lifestream Forums" instead.
In-line images:
- Should be centered on their own line or floated right with wrapping text if they're not full-width. Left-floated images disrupt the flow of text, so avoid those.
- Should be in PNG format if they need transparency or need to be pixel-accurate, JPG otherwise. All screenshots, for example, should be JPGs. This is to keep the file size down and make our website load faster for visitors.
- Should usually be captioned. The caption can be added from Wordpress's "add media" dialog or with the fig and figcaption HTML tags. If the image is otherwise referred to in the text, (e.g. "as you can see from the image on the right...") it probably doesn't need a caption.
Featured images:
- Should exist! This might seem obvious, but lots of our articles don't have featured images, so I'm going to have to go back and add them.
- Should have a 16:9 aspect ratio. I've made sure that the images will always display with this ratio across the site, wherever they appear. If you use something else, it'll get stretched or cropped. Common resolutions with this ratio are 1280x720 and 1920x1080.
- Should be at least 837 pixels wide and 471 pixels high. These numbers aren't arbitrary: 837 is the maximum width of our article space (and hence the maximum size of the featured image), and 471 is the corresponding height in a 16:9 ratio. If it's easier for you to remember, aim for a one of the common resolutions I mentioned above. Always upload the highest resolution image you have, since Wordpress automatically generates smaller sizes to serve to visitors.
- Should not contain text in the top third of the image. This is because text will be overlayed when they're in the top three articles on the front page. (I'm going to have to edit the Retrospective image as a result.)
- Should generally not contain transparency. Transparent images look weird on the front page, especially when they're in the top three articles section, because a slight gradient overlay is applied to increase text readability.
The excerpt:
- Should exist. Again, lots of our old articles don't have excerpts.
- Should be no longer than 117 characters. Not only does this ensure that they won't take up too many lines on the front page, it means that our Social Media Manager can share them directly on Twitter without having to make any changes, since links are always truncated to 23 characters. (Twitter may eventually stop counting links towards the 140-character limit, but it hasn't yet.)
Tags and categories:
- Should follow the rules I set out here. TL;DR: exactly one category per article and tags that refer to the games the article is about - don't just go making up your own tags like "Zack", because that's not how we use the system.
Search engine optimisation:
- Will be filled out automatically when you hit "publish" unless you've entered the fields manually. Title is just the article title, Description is the excerpt and Keywords are the article tags, all of which you should have already written/chosen. You can add some generic keywords if you want, stuff like "Square Enix", "Final Fantasy", maybe "Cloud" or "Nobuo Uematsu", but it's probably not necessary.
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