Your Website’s Fountain of Youth Part 2: Training and Guidelines

A successful website depends on the right training and guidelines, and content strategy.

Last time, we talked about how editorial calendars help your website stay fresh, accurate, and relevant for the long haul. Today’s digital fountain of youth consists of training and guidelines. Does that sound dull? It doesn’t have to be. Also, your website’s livelihood depends on them.

Why is training important?

Sadly, websites are not self-sustaining creatures. They require people (hi!) to maintain them so they can continue to hum along as lead-generating, question-answering, communication machines. But those people need the know-how to support their daily content decision-making.

Training also helps build buy-in. Sometimes, the folks in charge of updating content aren’t full-time web professionals. We can use training as an opportunity not just to walk them through the usage of a particular system, but to help them understand and become invested in the value and impact of their work.

What kind of training and guidelines should I be thinking about?

It all depends on what people need to do, and therefore need to know. Training could include:

  • content management (specific to your tool)

  • web writing, editing, and publishing

  • social media best practices

  • analytics tools (like Google Analytics) and measurement best practices

  • front-end development (HTML/CSS)

  • multimedia development (photography, video shooting and editing)

As for guidelines, those also depend on what you’re publishing. Generally speaking, a web editorial style guide (complete with voice and tone guidelines) is a solid foundation, but you may need to create guidelines for:

  • homepage content criteria

  • creating news content

  • criteria for events

  • curation guidelines

  • web writing and SEO best practices

  • taxonomy

  • community management guidelines

  • accessibility guide

  • imagery (dimensions, standards, visual style)

How I can develop and implement training?

You could develop resources in-house, utilize third-party resources, or create a blend of both!

For the in-house approach, you can find internal experts or partner with external vendors to develop and deliver training sessions and relevant guidelines customized to your needs. Offer training sessions on a regular basis, both to provide your colleagues with the opportunity for new and refresher training, as well as to continually reassert its importance.

When you develop guidelines, rather than publishing and disseminating them via PDFs, try using a digital format like a Google Doc or wiki so there is always one canonical version that can be easily shared and updated.

As far as third-party resources go, there are a lot out there, including:

At both an individual and group level, these organizations (and many more) offer in-depth training on anything from web writing to CSS, both online and in-person.

Conferences, books, and blogs also provide less structured yet still immensely valuable opportunities to learn.

Training and guidelines are a fountain of youth because...

They support the people who support your website, and the better informed those people are about their work, the better off your website will be.