Page Editing & Web Writing

Creating a useful website begins with knowing how to structure the page content and understanding how to write for your audience.

Structuring Content on a Page

Page editing begins with structuring and prioritizing your content. If you make strategic choices about how you present content, your audience will easily find what they need. 

TU webpages are structured with this general page layout to help you prioritize your content: 

  • The intro text region is a brief introduction to your page content.
  • The main content region is where you add primary content.
  • The right sidebar region is for secondary content.
  • The full-width region is for contact information, as well as news and events callouts.

In addition to knowing the regions of a webpage, you’ll want to know how to structure your content. Design snippets will add visual interest to a page. Adding subheaders, bullets and callouts makes your page easier to read. 

Writing for the Web

Writing for the Web is not the same as writing for print. To connect with your online audience, follow this advice: 

  1. Write with your audience in mind (not just internal stakeholders).
  2. Get to the point quickly.
  3. Focus your content to help your audience complete their tasks.

Pasting Text into the CMS

Don’t Paste from MS Word

Many web editors draft their text in Microsoft Word. While this is fine as a first step, it’s not a good idea to paste text from Word directly into Modern Campus CMS.

Copying and pasting from MS Word can introduce hidden code that will cause issues with the underlying CSS code of the content management system.

To avoid potential formatting problems, remember to:

  • paste your MS Word text into Notepad (or SimpleText on a Mac)
  • copy the text you added to Notepad (SimpleText)
  • paste the text you copied from Notepad or SimpleText into Modern Campus CMS