Sharing our thoughts on all things digital

Producing relevant, up-to-date online content is a challenge for content managers everywhere. The bigger your content output and the more stakeholders you have involved in the process, the harder it is to keep track of whatever is being created, edited, and published. If this is your use case, what you need is a clear, easily manageable content publication workflow.

Work from home is here to stay, even in a post-pandemic world. When COVID made companies figure out new processes to deal with remote operations, it uncovered new ways of staying productive and balancing work and life effectively. The result is that, while offices are reopening, many businesses are giving their workforce the option of being remote for part of the week or even going WFH indefinitely.

As a long-time member of the Drupal community and a co-founder of Evolving Web, I think there's a huge opportunity to leverage Drupal to build a stronger, more plural open source community. Drupal has long led the way in the digital space as a tool to create accessible content and experiences for all kinds of audiences. Being more explicit about our actions to increase the inclusiveness of the community that surrounds Drupal is an important next step.

As you may know, Drupal 8 is reaching end-of-life this year, and Drupal 7 will follow suit by November 2022. For this reason, Evolving Web and Pantheon will join forces for a free technical training session called Best Practices for Higher Ed Drupal Migrations on September 2.

We all recognize bad information architecture when we see it on a website. There are some signs that the creators didn't do a great job in terms of content structure and organization:

• Confusing menu labels
• Haphazard topic organization
• Critical information and actions jumbled in with general news and marketing copy
• Site searches that return useless, obsolete information

While it's frustrating to come across these issues on someone else's website, it feels much worse when we realize we've made those mistakes ourselves.

Using plain language is crucial to clear, simple communication. It helps you to create content that’s readily understandable, straightforward, and useful to your audience. When you follow plain language guidelines, readers will require fewer clarifications and make fewer mistakes when, for example, they fill out a form or apply for any kind of service.

In this article, we’ll provide plain language guidelines, examples, and tools that are useful for writing inclusive digital content. By following them, your readers will:

Learn how (and why!) higher education institutions can build diversity and inclusion into their admissions process.

Do you work with web content? Are you just getting started with using Drupal to publish your site?

Our team has written extensively about the different things you’ll need to navigate in order to successfully deploy your content strategy with Drupal as your CMS. We broke down this guide into five key themes: