Learning Journey: Working with Content Hub
Making a top-notch news story requires thinking from a multitude of angles.
To stand out, it really needs to be an appealing and good experience for all readers, regardless of platform, format, and engagement style. We’re going to go over some of those methods of interacting with an article and how to ensure it stands out.
Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content
We have a lot of very interesting projects going on at Mason and we want to make sure people are finding our stories. Ergo, it is natural to want to prioritize search engine results and social media trends to get the most measurable results. For all the standards and tests out there, though, there is no metric or ruler for genuinely good content. Ergo, we advise above all else, you focus on ensuring your content puts the reader and their needs first. Even Google, an authority on making your content rank well in search engine results, tells SEO experts to create people-first content.
How does one best create this sort of content? Here’s a few questions you can ask yourself:
- Does your news story have a primary focus or narrative?
- Does your story answer the initial question or topic it seeks to answer?
- Does the content display depth of knowledge on a topic while also expressing those topics in a reader-friendly way?
- Are you adding value to what others have written on the topic or event?
- After reading, will your reader walk away feeling they have the full story and/or the resources to learn more?
Think Mobile
Nowadays, many people get their news and updates through their phones or tablets, rather than a more standard computer. The dimensions of these screens are very different from a standard computer monitor. SiteMasonry is designed to automatically adjust for mobile displays. However, sometimes this adjustment will make your page look different than you'd like.
Fortunately, these sorts of layout changes are easy to check. The obvious answer can be to use your own phone or tablet to view the page and see how things look. However, most modern browsers also come with developer tools to simulate mobile device screens. This will let you rapidly test your page on a variety of device screens.
Good Titles mean Good Messaging
The title of your article is sometimes the only part of your article that a reader ever sees. You want to make sure it sticks in their mind and entices them to learn more, without being overly long!
For example, consider this made-up headline:
Mason team is one of six Tier A recipients of [organization] Prize
This headline is good but it could be much better. First of all, we recommend starting a headline with the focus of the headline, where possible. There are situations where headlines may be truncated very short; showing the subject will attract more attention than starting every headline with some variation of "Mason."
Secondly, this headline could be energized to better "tease" the content of the article. "One of six Tier A winners of [organization] Prize" doesn't tell me how I should feel. Is Tier A the top tier? What does that mean? Was this a contest? Or did we just happen to be nominated? Instead, we can focus on describing the situation as succinctly as possible, without using specifics.
Consider this alternative headline and how it makes you feel compared to the previous one:
Breakthrough in [subject] wins Mason team a top prize from [organization]
Does this headline attract your attention better? It captures your attention with the high energy words like "breakthrough", "wins", and "top prize" without distracting specifics. If you were to read nothing else of the article, you'd still know Mason was doing award-winning research on a specific subject. Do what you can to provide the article's message in one succinct, but informative statement.
Expect to be Shared
Even if you have no distribution plans of your own, web content is highly shareable. One can’t predict which stories will be shared by your readers. Dr. Washington, for example, avidly promotes Mason on social media; he may be sharing your story! Therefore, it is always worth it to take the time to prep your article for potential sharing on social media.
When you create your news story, you are required to add a thumbnail and summary to it. However, now is the time to revisit those. Summary text should be a one to two sentence summary of your article, both being informative and inviting the reader to learn more. The thumbnail ideally should be a visual representation of your story. This image should be a square (1:1 ratio) between 300 and 600 pixels on each side. You can use a tool like OpenGraph to see what your page will look like when shared.
Double Check the Details
There are so many things that go into making good content for the web that it is easy to miss some on an initial pass. Here are a few things that you may want to look out for:
- Make sure all your images have appropriate alt text so that screen readers can interpret them.
- Check that all of your hyperlinks work correctly. Relative links have a tendency to break when an article is exported to multiple sites, so it is best to use the full URL (starting with https://...) to avoid any errors.