Develop a Style Guide for Your Site

If you own, run, or produce Websites, you need a style guide. Designer, developer, marketer, or small business owner: a style guide can make your life easier.

I know this sounds like a sweeping generalization, but think about it. If you have more than one page on your Website, you need to have some kind of standard that identifies how you'll format your content -- images, text or otherwise:

• will top level text headings be bold, or bold and italic?
• will images within text be right justified with word wrap, or centered within the text?
• will you refer to your business as MyFirm.com, My Firm Pty Ltd, www.myfirm.com, or something else entirely?

These are just a few of the types of issues that a style guide solves.

So let's take a look at the concept of the style guide. What is it? Why should we use it? Who should use it? And what information should it contain?

If you own or run your own site, you can take this information and apply it on your own site. And if you develop sites for clients, why not prepare a pro-forma document that your customers can adapt to their own needs? It'll make you seem more professional, and make their job easier.

What is a Style Guide?

A style guide is a document that prescribes the 'styles' or standard format for the presentation of information.

It deals systematically with the presentation of content in a particular publication, identifying any standards that the publisher wants to apply holistically to all content across that publication.

Style guides have a big role in publishing, but the concept is also prolific in design. Many large companies, for instance, have style guides that prescribe to designers and artists how the company logo may be used (for example) -- which background colours it may appear upon, what it will look like when reversed, in black and white, etc.

Why Use a Style Guide?

The key purpose of a style guide is to make your life easier. All the aspects we'll discuss here have one result -- they reduce the amount of thought you have to put into tiny details on an ongoing basis.

This means you can focus on bigger things that require precious brain power: landing the next big client, analyzing your traffic figures, planning new additions to your site...

So how exactly can a style guide reduce your workload?

It Makes Content Preparation Easier

Here at SitePoint, our StyleGuide advises that the word 'Website' be published just like that -- capital 'W', all one word. Not 'web site' or 'Web site' or even 'website'.

So, every time we edit content for publication, instead of having to question which form of the word we'll use, and then making sure we use the same form through that article, we simply use the SitePoint standard spelling. Having a 'rule' for this word means it's a no-brainer, and allows us to focus on the message of the content, rather than minutiae like capitalisation.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, 'SitePoint StyleGuide' is another standard SitePoint word that's used to refer specifically to our own guidelines document. Yes -- standards are everywhere.

It Makes Content Maintenance Easier

The internal version of the SitePoint StyleGuide also tells us how to label any images that are included in articles, how to consolidate articles, how to retire old content... you name it, it's in there. These standards make it easier to revise existing content and to manage the vast (and growing) repository of content that's associated with our site.

So if we need to update an author's photo, we know that we can find it easily among the plethora of images stored for the site using a certain prefix -- a prefix that's identified in the SitePoint StyleGuide.

The added benefit here, of course, is that it doesn't matter who's looking for the image -- everyone has access to the StyelGuide, and therefore, everyone (or any new staff who come on board) will quickly be able to learn and understand the way our content is managed, and then apply those same standards through their work.

And these same benefits apply to any site where a professional, regular approach to content management is required.