Landing pages

• A website's landing page is also referred to as the home page. It is the main page for your website.
• The overall landing page content should focus on the academic department's or office's strategies and goals.
• If your landing page template has a column for a lead story, please limit the content to one current item. To keep your landing page looking fresh, replace the feature story or news item every couple of weeks. To ensure variety, you may wish to schedule appearances of news and event items on the landing page.
• Your landing page template may have a column for secondary news, announcements or upcoming events. Please ensure that these items are not out of date and give your audience enough lead time. Please try to minimize news and content on a landing page. More messages on your landing page make it harder to focus on the important ones.

News section

• News that is older than two years should be completely removed from the website.

Quality assurance

• All website copy should conform to university style. For more information about university style, please consult the Editorial Style Guide.
• Scheduling monthly reviews will help you keep on top of content. Monthly reviews consist of assessing the landing page and news sections, at a minimum. You should plan a full website audit twice a year. If your site is a high-traffic one, you should plan on quarterly full-site reviews. Please contact OUR to determine if your site is high traffic. During your review, look for broken links (404 errors), out-of-date content, pages with low traffic, important content your users can't easily find and text not within the guidelines for university style. 
• The Office of University Relations uses an online service called Siteimprove to assist in quality assurance on marquette.edu. Siteimprove helps track broken links and spelling errors; provides an easy-to-use report detailing where these issues occur; and includes an inventory of all pages, media and documents on websites. As a content owner, Siteimprove will identify issues to help content owners maintain their website.
• When creating or updating pages, verify that links on your new or updated page are working correctly. 
• Ensure that your images are cropped accordingly to the template style and are at a low resolution for web use.

PDFs and documents

• When updating an existing file, make sure the file is named the same as the current file before uploading to the server. This allows you to overwrite your existing file.

Linking

• When linking content, please avoid using "click here" or "here" as the linked text. Rather, use descriptive content such as, "Contact the Office of University Relations." By using descriptive content, you provide accessibility to your audience and enhance search engine optimization.

Copy (written text)

• Large blocks of text are harder to scan for web users. Try to break up your copy into smaller chunks. Use bulleted lists when possible. You want easy-to-scan materials.
• Use descriptive page headlines and subheadlines and relevant keywords. Using content keywords in subheads can enhance search engine visibility.
• If a page has a lot of content and is broken up by headlines, consider creating separate pages for each headline. Alternatively, there may be a case where content needs anchor links to better guide the user.

Multimedia

• The use of visual elements, such as video or images, is encouraged on Marquette's websites. However, images and video should be placed in appropriate locations within the template. Please contact OUR for appropriate placement and file dimensions.