Welcome to the Style and User Guide for Exeter Writers’ Blog and Website. This guide is for anyone who needs to use the blog or undertake maintenance tasks on the website, such as updating competition pages, or publishing regular blog posts.

This guide is meant to help you and future blog and website managers for Exeter Writers’ Group maintain a consistent and professional appearance across all webpages and posts.

It is a guidance on words, phrases and expressions for tone of voice purposes, and also guidance on abbreviations, capitalisation, spellings and typeface. There will also be consideration given to how to write weblinks and formatting.

The aim is to provide managers and writers with guidance to ensure that the voice of Exeter Writers’ Group remains consistent in writing style, grammar, punctuation, spelling and appearance.  Readers expect consistency and consistency builds trust, and when we have our audience’s trust we can share more about our own works with positive results.

If we don’t follow a house style, inconsistencies will creep in, particularly because of the number of contributors to the blog from different backgrounds.  The result will be a disorganised website and blog, that will turn people off.

Contents

1 |  Website User Guide

1.1 | Layout

1.2 | Theme designer

1.3 |  Adding and removing members from the members pages

1.4 | Good maintenance practices

1.5 |Recommendations for the future

2 |  Style Guide For Bloggers

2.1 |Getting started and posting a blog

2.2 | Accessibility

2.3 | Tone of Voice

2.4 | Style Guide Punctuation and Grammar

2.5 | Weblinks

2.6 | Images

2.7 | Author Bios

3 |   Content Strategy

3.1 | The Four Pillars

3.2 | Understanding Blogger Stats

3.3 | How working with Social Media Officer can improve our Visitor Count

3.4 | Long Term Content Plan

1| Website User Guide

1.1| Layout

When you get added to the EW blogger site as an admin you will see menu bar down the left side.

Blogger is a very basic website. Most functionality is limited unless you are a coder and can use coding language to make changes at that level. You will find most customisation settings in the LAYOUT menu.

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This shows the various aspects that make up the website.

As you can see, the Sidebar (top) has not been engaged. The reason for this is that our contributors do not have direct access to uploading posts, but rather go through the blog manager who edits, proofs and then schedules the posts.

Sidebar (bottom) refers to the dropdown menu that appears on our website. See the image on the next page. Search (Top) refers to the magnifying glass symbol enabling visitors to search our site. Header refers to the gadget that is the title. Page list (top) is our menu bar under the Exeter Writers Logo. Ads have not been activated.

Page body shows how the blog feed is set up. And lastly, Footer shows our attribution gadget.

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These areas have limited customising functions. Further customisation can be done by following the Theme designer link visible in the first image.