See related article How to Publish Content in Drupal

This article applies to pages that are:

• Completely new, about to be published for the first time
• Pre-existing pages that are being edited and updated (as a sanity check)

Pre-publishing checklist

1. Brand Guidelines

   • Confirm that page content follows Lesley brand guidelines.
   • This includes Lesley's Editorial Style Guide (for date, time, naming conventions, avoiding abbreviations, etc.)

2. Reading Level

   • You should be able to read the entire page and easily understand what is being said.
   • Target reading level is 5th to 8th grade.
   • TIP: You can use Microsoft Word to assess reading level.
     1. Paste text into a new document
     2. Press F7 to check spelling and grammar
     3. In the side panel that opens up, click “Document Stats”
        RESULT: Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is displayed

3. Accessibility

   • Refer to W3C's Writing for Web Accessibility: Tips for Getting Started, which covers:
     • Provide informative, unique page titles
     • Use headings to convey meaningful structure
       • See also: W3C Heading Guidelines
       • Lesley convention: 
         • Heading 2 should be the first heading on the page
         • Heading 1 should not be used in the page content (since it is programmed into each page's template as the page title)
     • Make link text meaningful
       • Rather than writing something like "Click here" for the link text, make it clear what the viewer is clicking on. For example, you would want to use this whole sentence as the link text: "Register for the Virtual Information Session."
     • Write meaningful alternative text for images (describe what is in the image)
       • Note: if there are words within an image, those words need to be included in the alternative text
     • Create transcripts and captions for multimedia (e.g. videos, podcasts, etc.)
     • Provide clear instructions
     • Keep content clear and concise
   • See related article: Writing for the Web: A Checklist

4. Images

   • If you need to upload an image:
     • First: Ask yourself if you should be uploading images, or if someone who is more knowledgable with image size, resolution, cropping and optimization should be doing this.
     • Second: Use https://tinypng.comto optimize the image. 
       • For more information, view this article on optimizing and saving images and this one on uploading images to Drupal.

5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

   • See SEO article from Lesley Knowledge Base Pre-Support Hub.

6. Quality Assurance

   • Before you publish:

     • Test all links:
       • Make sure links work
       • Make sure links to offsite destinations open in a new browser tab
     • Fact check
       • Make sure facts, dates, names, titles, etc. are correct
     • Check for spelling and grammar errors

   •  As you publish:

     • Save as draft (and review the draft) before you save and publish
     • Put in a comment in the revision log summarizing what changed

   • Important check after publishing: 

     • After you save and publish, open the page in an incognito window to confirm the changes are truly visible to the general public, not just to someone who is logged into Drupal
       • Check how the page looks on your phone as well, as the way the page is set up and where things are located will likely be different 
         • Note: this is why you should never write something like, "The information is below," or "See the menu on the right," because whatever you're referring to may not be "below" or "on the right" across all devices  

Siteimprove: What do content editors need to know?

Siteimprove is a service that Lesley uses to identify content issues on the Lesley website. Content editors should have an awareness of the types of issues that are flagged by Siteimprove so that those issues can be addressed upstream (while editing and updating content) instead of downstream (after surfacing in a Siteimprove report due to a problem when the content was entered).

Among the types of issues flagged by Siteimprove, there are some where content editors can have direct positive impact. These are:

• Spelling errors
• Broken links
• Reading level too advanced