Office of the President Branding Guide
All Office of the President digital communications, including official university websites, are required to adhere to branding guidelines set forth by the Communications Department. Our branding templates contains official logos, colors, fonts, and other background to follow.
Writing for the Web and Digital Communications
Drupal Content Management System
The Office of the President website, Massachusetts.edu and other official sites use the Drupal Content Management System to post and edit online materials. The CMS is available to trained content editors, typically assigned by department heads, to keep their online material updated and relevant to both internal and external visitors. For information on how to get training and access, file a ticket with the Digital Experience (DX) team.
Organizing Your Content
It's strongly encouraged for you to post content using Drupal rather than files, like PDFs. Our CMS is set up to provide an optimal layout and styling for your content and to serve our students, staff, faculty and friends with digitally accessible content.
Using clear headings and text are the most effective means of communications, even more than images. Organizing your information into sections with short headings and concise text make content easier to read, more organized and provides an optimal experience with keyboard shortcuts. The style editors in Drupal are simplified so that you can layout your content easily.
Write for Your Audience
We are a higher education institution but your writing needs to reach a multitude of diverse audiences of all ages. Your content is more easily read in a conversational tone for all ages, including prospective students. Do not use slang and carefully edit your work, including spell checking and grammatical checks. Other tips include:
- Brevity and Clarity: Keep your page and content as short as possible. If you have a sea of text, first try to edit it down significantly and focus on the major points. If unable to do so, it might make more sense to break one page into two or more and create pages with more focused content.
- Inverted pyramic style: Used in journalism, this involves putting the most essential information at the top of the page and less relevant content near the bottom. Your readers will find value in finding the most important content up high on your page than forcing them to read all the way through.
- Page Title: Your page title should be as brief as possible, ideally less than 3-4 words. This title also becomes the URL for the page so keep it to the point.
- Use subheadings effectively: You'll notice on this page that sections are labeled with subheadings. This makes the page more scannable if a reader is looking for specific section.
- Avoid Acronyms: Although common in higher education, avoid using them or provide a strong first reference. For instance, when referring to a department or a program, such as STEM, you'll want the first reference to read as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and then use the acronym STEM for subsequent references.
- Provide some variety of text: Our CMS is built to provide you different layout options based on the content. Not only does it help you organize your content better but it breaks up the page to give it visual appeal so it's more enticing to reach.
Hyperlinks
Use hyperlinks within your text to give readers the option of exploring your content more deeply. Never copy and paste a url but link your text so it makes sense for the reader. For instance, a sentence that reads: Marty Meehan is the 27th president of the University of Massachusetts could include a hyperlink to a page that lets visitors learn more about him.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When creating content on the Web, you'll want it easily findable with both external and internal search engines. The key to good SEO is to use relevant search terms. Think carefully about what terms somewhat might use on the Web if searching for your content and then include those keyworks in the text of your page. It's important to ensure that these keywords are indeed relevant. If you use the term, "shopping discount codes" on your page and it doesn't offer them or provide relevant content, you're doing a readers a disservice and will be penalized by search engines.
Using Photos
The careful placement of photos and icons can provide some visual interest to a page of otherwise all text. However, be strategic and know that less is more.
Ensure that all photos adhere to the UMass Brand Guide. Using photos produced using AI (Artificial Intelligence) is currently not allowed. It's highly recommended you use approved photos from The University Office of the President Communications team due to rights and permissions. Contact the Communications team to request approved photos. If using other photos or iconography, ensure that you have obtained rights to use those on umassp.edu.
If unsure, file a case with the DX Team to get advice.
Data Visualization and Graphics
When using graphics on the website, do not copy and paste them from reports and then post them as images. This will be a bad experience for users, particularly on mobile devices. These images are also usually not digitally accessible. Moreover, posting a report that contains graphics in a PDF is prohibited due to accessibility concerns (and PDFs tend not to be a good user experience anyway).
The DX Team can help you with building digitally accessible graphics and charts or ensure that your PDF is accessible. For more, visit the Digital Accessibility Guide.