I work on the web team for McHenry County College (MCC), a two-year
community college in Crystal Lake, Illinois. As part of the Marketing and Public
Relations Department, our team is responsible for the college's website communication.
When I was first hired, I was surprised to learn that the web team did not have a style
guide for the website in place. My previous work experience as an editorial assistant at
a publishing house showed me the value of an accessible style guide for daily tasks,
primarily because it brings editorial and stylistic consistency to an organization's
communications. I assumed that a publication as complicated as an institutional website
composed of thousands of web pages would have a corresponding style guide as well.
My coworker explained that the team had been meaning to create a web style guide for
the last few years, but it always got bumped to the bottom of the priority list when new
projects came in.
In an effort to prioritize an important tool for an organization’s communication
plan, I undertook the development of a web style guide for MCC. I surveyed the
published literature and discovered that although much had been written about
corporate style guide creation, nothing existed about how to create a web style guide.
Additionally, my research on 70 web style guides from peer institutions revealed that
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there was no correlation between the quality of a web style guide and the quality of the
corresponding website—exemplary web style guides were found on sub-par websites,
and vice-versa. Finally, based on a content analysis of web style guides, I developed a
new approach for creating a web style guide for higher education institutions.
In this paper I describe both the process we used to create a web style guide for a
higher education institution as well as the final product. We established the value of a
web style guide, consulted published literature on best practice for style guide creation,
evaluated web style guides from around the country, and formed a content-based
method of creating a web style guide. Based on this process, I recommend that web
style guides should combine the editorial and technical standards of a website, to better
reflect the changing nature of web communications. Technical communicators who use
this process will have a web style guide that can help their website earn higher search
engine results, satisfy federal and state accessibility requirements, and better serve their
end users by making information easier to find.