Developing a Styleguide and Templates
Step 6: Developing a Style Guide and Templates
Why do you need a style guide and templates?
Styleguide and templates assist in structuring the texts and make the content easier to read.
They give the end-user a unified experience.
They assist editors when writing new texts.
Process:
- Find Texts that you think are easy to read and understand.
- Try to pin down what's good in them. Find Texts that are the opposite, and identify the negative aspects.
- Develop guidelines that you want to follow when working with your knowledge management texts.
Example style guide:
A style guide may contain rules like:
- Primary knowledge resides inside the text itself, secondary knowledge resides in documents or will be linked
- Titles should identify the content of the texts
- use bullet points
- create a number of font-styles and stick to them
Which templates do you need?
Identify repetitive content-types (e.g processes, product information etc)
Develop the templates in such a way that they pre-define the structure and formatting of the texts
Editors may fill in some details, but keep the overall structure.