Basics
Regular blog posts (known as “News” posts) are good for search engine optimization and they’re good for client engagement. Your audience wants to know what your organization is doing. Some examples of potential topics would be:
- Staffing Announcements
- Publications of Note
- Upcoming Events
- Conference Attendance
- Interest Pieces
As with every piece of content on your website, each blog post has content fields that are required to be populated before the article is published.
Guidelines
Be Intentional
Every blog post should have a purpose. Defining that purpose for yourself is essential to writing a successful post. Think of the intention as a goal, for instance: “I want more people to engage our executive director at the next conference.” Keeping the post’s intention in front of you at all times will help you focus your language as you write.
The Title Should be Descriptive and Active
Use the intention of your post to develop a title that is both descriptive and active. A good title for the blog post above might be, “Meet the Center’s Director at [Name of Conference].” Please also keep in mind that post titles should never be more than 10 words in length.
Get to the Point
Just like any other primary content field on your website, the content for a blog post should be written with the intended voice and tone of the organization. While blog/news posts are typically shorter than most deeper content on the website, a minimum word count of 150 and a maximum word count of 300 should be the target for posts. Use of secondary headings are always encouraged, but one should never repeat the title of the post with a heading in the primary content field.
Find the Right Featured Image
A featured image is a requirement for all blog / news posts. You will find that field in the right-hand sidebar of the content editor. In order to keep your site ADA compliant, it is important that you use the “Alt Text” field to describe the image you are uploading in the image selection menu. Above all, the aspect ratio is the most important property of an image, but the following properties should be considered requirements:
- 3:2 aspect ratio
- Minimum pixel width of 1200
- Minimum pixel height of 800
- No white backgrounds or transparent .png files
- No obvious pixelation or unnaturally cropped photos
- No GIFs
- Landscape/horizontal crop not portrait/vertical
As long as you have a 3:2 aspect ratio photo that meets these requirements, WordPress will crop and resize any image to any space on the website, automatically.
Write an Intriguing Excerpt
Consider the excerpt of a post to be the text that would describe the article on someone’s Facebook feed or in a Google search result. These are sometimes referred to as “teaser text,” and they are intended to be a summary of the content in the post. The voice of the excerpt should match that of the title: descriptive and active.
Make Sure the Taxonomy is Right
There are several choices in the tagging / categorization of the posts. Make sure you choose “Events” for an event, or “News” for simple announcements and organization-related updates.