Jesse Racine was the presenter, from a college outside of Chicago (didn't catch the name).
To prepare for this presentation, a survey was sent out to hundreds of institutions asking about use and existence of style guides:
- 64% have a style guide
- 49% have never updated
What is involved in the web style guide:
- Editorial Style
- Visual Style guide (college requirements)
- Secret Web sauce
How do you go about doing this?
Step 1 - Get managerial buy-in
Without it, your efforts will fall short. In our political world of higher ed institutions, without buy-in from above the style guide will be squashed by the first manager/dean with other interests.
Step 2 - Create a committee
Get help with this. Many different ideas and examples exist on campus. Find out what the common needs are, mash them up with the institution needs and filter the results.
Step 3 - Determine the audience
Find out who you are building this for. Who will be building the pages and adding to content? What information do you need to give to them, how should you send it, etc... Different users demand different levels of detail.
Step 4 - Defining Content
Branding, grammer and punctuation and helpful. This goes back to the initial steps, find out what is needed, what your audience needs and create. You also need to apply the web-specific layer.
Step 5 - Distribute and get feedback
Find out what you did great, and what others probably don't like. Don't sweat the unlikes as long as you have supporting arguments for each case. Revolve these arguments around standards and user experience.
The presenter showed their style guide, which was a large pdf. I'll have a reply on this later, but I'll just say this seems like a failure to finish the project.
