Happy Halloween from the Digital Team! We hope you have had an exciting week – filled with treats, and not tricks! Here’s what we’ve been up to this week…

Halloween photo

Celebrating Halloween 2024…

This week, some of team got dressed up and took to the streets to trick or treat. James and his daughter, Anwen had a great Halloween and really got into the spirit of things, with plenty of fake blood and sweets!

We hope you all had a great night, whether you were out and about with the neighbourhood, or staying cosy on the couch with a scary film – a happy Halloween to all!

photo of james’ daughter trick or treating

Reviewing our upcoming LMS content…

Our team has been working on a number of new learning materials and workshops to help others in the organisation.

Some of the key concepts we are covering in our upcoming workshops include:

  • What is our website for? This course will outline the web proposition and detail what can be published onto the NRW website, and if unsuitable, where it can be published instead.

  • What is accessibility? This course will put a face to some of the accessibility requirements to demonstrate why accessibility matters, how to build inclusive content as well as showing some of the barriers users face when accessing inaccessible content.

  • Why is my table inaccessible? We’ve seen that tables are a bit of a pain point in the organisation, they are used for a variety of different purposes and often as a way of displaying data. In this course, we’ll take attendees through the different uses for tables, and the methods of building an accessible table, when the data calls for it.

  • How do I check and fix my own accessibility errors? This course is designed to take you through the steps of checking your own document for faults and correcting them in Word before sharing the document with us to be published. We’ll take attendees through the process of submitting work and the checklist to run through before hitting the ‘submit’ button.

This week, we met as a group to review the outlines that we’ve created as a team, to ensure the activities meet the key learning objectives for the module. We’ve been collating and anonymising real-life examples to help attendees get practical experience to better understand the learning topics.

photo of our team Trello board for brainstorming

Tracking user behaviour to drive insights…

More than ever, people across Wales are consuming more and more content. To stand out from the crowd and be known as a reliable, accurate source of information, our content must be clear and concise, with a strong focus on user behaviour.

It’s important to track content consumption patterns, so that organisations can consider upcoming trends. Consumption trends show us how content is performing, the way customers like to receive content, the best channels to use, potential challenges on the horizon, and so much more.

Charity Digital explains that consideration of mobile is essential for effective content creation. For far too long, charities and other organisations focussed on desktop and produced content that was hard-to-access and visually unappealing on mobile. That has changed in recent years but, as we shall see, the change has not been widespread enough.

Ensuring content is easily digestible on mobile is more important than ever, with over 57% of online traffic now coming from smart phones, as of March 2023, according to Statcounter.

Research suggests that 77% of internet users still read blog content, but they have preferences. 43% of users admit to skim-reading, which means organisations should adapt articles to allow for skimmability (small paragraphs, simple language and so on).

The ‘How to’ heading is a popular blog type, and around 17% of readers preferred this style of article. But over a third (36%) said the classic list-based headline, or listicle is their preferred content. Interestingly, odd numbered listicles perform better than even ones, so you should opt for ‘15 reasons to use odd-numbered lists’ rather than 16.

photo of pumpkins

What is SEO and why does it matter?

If our website’s search function is broken, or if the content that’s been published uses internal, organisational jargon instead of simple, straightforward language, then users will have a great deal of trouble locating relevant content.

To understand the importance of SEO, consider that 93% of all online experiences begin with search engines like Google or Bing. Nailing SEO means appearing on the first page of results, as 75% of users will not scroll beyond the first page, according to Search Engine Watch.

By incorporating search engine optimisation (SEO) into your online content, you can help Google and other search engines find and recommend your content to the right users – the people who are searching for an answer to their question.

Consider your keywords and language, are you speaking to the community you wish to reach? If you use jargon or legalise, you might exclude the public from your content. If you do not include terminology that is used by your readers, you might not get traffic on the page at all!

Optimising your content for SEO is crucial if you want to reach new audiences or be one of the top results produced by Google.

photo of a dog dressed up for trick or treating

Other things we’ve been working on:

  • Another busy week in the world of publishing! With a push on accessibility, we’ve been receiving reports and documents in a better state and they’re getting published sooner! You can speed up the publishing process by reviewing your content in line with our organisation’s style guide and accessibility requirements, with elements like alt-text already added to the document. We’ve been working with subject matter experts over the past year to help clarify the rules around accessibility and support our staff with meeting the legal requirements to get their content published on time.
  • Shaun has mainly been working on odds and ends this week, doing further work on forms for change, transfer and surrender an installations permit, making amends to ammonia assessment guidance for pig and poultry farms and planning how we can best provide information on Best Available Technique documents for Environmental Permitting as they switch from the European Union to the UK’s responsibility.
  • Lucinda has been preparing for another batch of discovery workshops next week on managing flood message content