Laughing and feeling your pain... we have a communications person (that's her 
job) who keeps using bold, italics, h1, in pink (yes pink), randomly in 
pages... luckily she only does internal pages, and not external.

You could schedule some writing for the web sessions, but I don't know that it 
will help. You could remove any text formatting... In the end, you probably 
should just do as I do: close the page, breathe deeply, get up and take a walk, 
and get on with other things.

Christina

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Simon 
LeFranc
Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2014 7:43 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] distributed responsibility for web content

My organization has recently adopted an enterprise Content Management System. 
For the first time, staff across 8 divisions became web authors, given 
responsibility for their division's web pages. Training on the software, which 
has a WYSIWYG interface for editing, is available and with practice, all are 
capable of mastering the basic tools. Some simple style decisions were made for 
them, however, it is extremely difficult to get these folks not to elaborate on 
or improvise new styles.  Examples:

    making text red or another color in the belief that color will draw 
readers' attention    making text bold and/or italic and/or the size of a 
war-is-declared headline (see 1);    using images that are too small to be 
effective    adding a few more images that are too small to be effective    
attempting to emphasize statements using ! or !! or !!!!!    writing in a 
too-informal tone ("Come on in outta the rain!") [We are a research 
organization and museum.]    feeling compelled to ornament pages with clipart, 
curlicues, et al.    centering everything
There is no one person in the organization with the time or authority to act as 
editorial overseer. What are some techniques for ensuring that the site 
maintains a clean, professional appearance? 

Simon

                                          

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