THE PROCESS OF CREATING A WEB STYLE GUIDE
Once we got the green light, we needed a game plan for how to create the web
style guide. What steps should be taken? What is the best process to adopt? There is
virtually nothing in the existing literature on the process of creating a web style guide;
the closest recommendation is the literature on creating a corporate style guide, the web
style guide’s close relative. Taking corporate style guides as my starting point, I
surveyed technical communication scholarship and practitioners’ texts on creating a
style guide to establish some consensus on the best approach to create our guide.
Gain Managerial Approval
Thankfully, we had already taken the recommended first step: getting the
necessary stakeholder buy-in by gaining managerial approval (Allen 287).
Form a Committee
Indirectly, we also accomplished the second recommended step, forming a
committee to involve coworkers early in the process (Gelb and Gardiner 470, Johnson,
par. 2, Quesenbery 5). A committee of three was still a committee, and I could not write
the guide for such a large site by myself. Only a ―divide-and-conquer‖ strategy was
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plausible.
Define the Audience
Once we solidified managerial buy-in and formed a working committee, we took
the next step suggested by Allen by defining the audience of the document (287). Who
would most likely use it? This is an important step because different users demand
different levels of detail. For instance, a web style guide created for a departmental
secretary who inputs content through a content management system (CMS) would look
dramatically different than a web style guide created for someone who ―hand-codes‖
each web page.
Initially I thought we should write the web style guide for our director, so that it
would not assume too much technical knowledge of the end user, and I even started
writing portions of it with her in mind. However, after discussing it some more, my
coworker persuaded me it would have more value if it were written for a new employee.
―This way,‖ she said, ―we could make it sound 'a little bossy' by being direct.‖ That is,
the web style guide would be easier to follow if it were composed of directives: ―Do
this, check this,‖ etc. A new employee could follow the guide verbatim to accomplish a
task.
Create the Content of a Web Style Guide
Once we identified our audience, we needed to create the actual content. The
literature I surveyed suggested we break this process down into several steps. First,
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Bright advises choosing a comprehensive style guide to backup the minutiae of editorial
terms and then adopting a flexible medium that can be quickly updated (45-47, see also
Magyar 540-41). We already used the Associated Press 2008 Stylebook as our
comprehensive style guide for the department.
We considered several options when choosing our preferred medium for the
working document: should we use a free online wiki, Microsoft Word, or some other
technology? Our goal was to use a software application that was flexible, as Bright
advises, and supported collaboration among members of our team. We decided to use
Google Docs to create the style guide because we were curious about the feature set and
had heard good reviews of the product. Google Docs is a free web-based word
processor that allows multiple users to view or edit a document, regardless of location.
Because it is online, it can function like a wiki; different people can be given permission
to either edit or view the document. The interface is immediately familiar to anyone
who has used a desktop-based word processor, such as Word. Another benefit is that
Google Docs allows you to see a detailed revision history, so you can view who added
what and when they did so.
Now we could begin to flesh out our content. We needed to include a section on
common editorial terms. Damrau gives a helpful list of often overlooked grammar,
punctuation, and branding issues that style guides typically address (357, see also Bright
47-48). Our existing departmental style guide answered most of these questions; we had
a few web-specific items to add, but nothing major. For example, we wanted to delete
the hyphen in the word e-mail to make it email, and we also wanted to spell out months,
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to avoid any difficulty screen readers may have with abbreviations.
Taylor-Collins recommends that we work from existing needs, and the
smattering of Post-It notes covered this point as well (472, see also Wieringa 531).
Similarly, Redish advises that a web style guide be organic, that it ―start small and grow
as issues and questions arise‖ (345). Until now, the recommendations derived from
creating a corporate style guide were largely answered by our existing editorial
resources: we already had a comprehensive style guide in place, we had a departmental
style guide to draw from, and we had a pile of Post-It notes that pointed to our existing
needs. We were further along than we anticipated.
However, for the next step we were on our own: creating web-specific content.
What should we include? Exclude? Magyar recommends that to get started ―you steal
from the best. Begin by finding good examples of the class of documents [you are
interested in] and specifying components that aren't covered by a general guide‖ (541).
With this in mind, we decided to survey existing higher education web style guides to
find the good examples to follow and to note components of existing guides, hoping
that we could use the best guides as a starting point for our own web style guide.