The Best of Our Best Practices, Vol. 1
When making recommendations for improving content and design to our clients, we advise them to follow our “best practices”. Best practices can be defined as professional procedures that are accepted or prescribed as being correct or most effective. With more than 15 years' experience developing local government websites, we have established our own credible set of best practices for making (and keeping) your city’s website a user-friendly experience for your citizens.
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| North Oaks's site visitors are a happy bunch |
Here are six examples of “the best of our best practices” and how you can apply them. They are the fastest most effective ways to improve your GovOffice website right now.
Review your content
THE Cardinal Rule. Keep an eye on your page content – the text, images, sidebars, announcements, Items, and so on. Is everything up to date? Is that Fall Festival still being promoted in the middle of winter? Remove any and all content that is no longer relevant. Our Editing Toolbar is the essential tool to enable you to clean up, reformat and modify your content.
Organize your navigation
Limit your primary (first level) navigation menu items to 10 vertical and 7 horizontal. If your site navigation is unruly, your visitors will be overwhelmed. Don’t make them think! They want to spend as little time as possible on your site (sorry to say) getting the information they need. Follow this tutorial on how to move Sections to help organize your navigation menus.
Keep your Homepage clean
Following the previous points, get rid of the clutter. A clean, streamlined homepage is much more inviting and improves the utility of your website. A quality site begins at the homepage. However, well-intentioned Web Administrators make the mistake of thinking everything needs to appear on the homepage. It doesn’t. People will have no problem finding information as long as your site is well organized. Learn how to add Promotions to your site. It's one easy way to keep things clean.
Arrange your images
It’s fun to add images to pages and the can certainly add variety, but like other pieces of content, they can also be too much of a good thing. Follow our recommendations for placing images on your site. Make use of the included Image Gallery.
Use correct Content Types
The easiest way to arrange, format and display your website pages correctly is to use the right content type. Each content type is designed for specific information. For example, the Basic content type is useful for most sections that simply require text and images, the Events content type is used to display information that requires dates or a calendar, the News content type is best for displaying news and announcements. Let the GovOffice CMS content types do the work!
Update your design
Maybe it's just time to update your design. Nothing like a fresh start. You may want consider adding one of our Content Services too. We are the professionals after all and can help take some that workload off of your shoulders!
Need more help? GovOffice clients get FREE, unlimited Training & Technical Support.
Contact us to learn more!
Review your content
THE Cardinal Rule. Keep an eye on your page content – the text, images, sidebars, announcements, Items, and so on. Is everything up to date? Is that Fall Festival still being promoted in the middle of winter? Remove any and all content that is no longer relevant. Our Editing Toolbar is the essential tool to enable you to clean up, reformat and modify your content.
Organize your navigation
Limit your primary (first level) navigation menu items to 10 vertical and 7 horizontal. If your site navigation is unruly, your visitors will be overwhelmed. Don’t make them think! They want to spend as little time as possible on your site (sorry to say) getting the information they need. Follow this tutorial on how to move Sections to help organize your navigation menus.
Keep your Homepage clean
Following the previous points, get rid of the clutter. A clean, streamlined homepage is much more inviting and improves the utility of your website. A quality site begins at the homepage. However, well-intentioned Web Administrators make the mistake of thinking everything needs to appear on the homepage. It doesn’t. People will have no problem finding information as long as your site is well organized. Learn how to add Promotions to your site. It's one easy way to keep things clean.
Arrange your images
It’s fun to add images to pages and the can certainly add variety, but like other pieces of content, they can also be too much of a good thing. Follow our recommendations for placing images on your site. Make use of the included Image Gallery.
Use correct Content Types
The easiest way to arrange, format and display your website pages correctly is to use the right content type. Each content type is designed for specific information. For example, the Basic content type is useful for most sections that simply require text and images, the Events content type is used to display information that requires dates or a calendar, the News content type is best for displaying news and announcements. Let the GovOffice CMS content types do the work!
Update your design
Maybe it's just time to update your design. Nothing like a fresh start. You may want consider adding one of our Content Services too. We are the professionals after all and can help take some that workload off of your shoulders!
Need more help? GovOffice clients get FREE, unlimited Training & Technical Support.
Contact us to learn more!
