Define, Develop, Determine and Do. 

1. Define the roles of authority 

Successful content governance requires a concrete understanding of who is in charge of making decisions about your website. While it may seem easier said than done, one way to help enforce roles of authority is via the use of an easy task and responsibility management tool. For example, all of the intuitive web management tools available in Siteimprove’s Web Governance Suite allow for role assignment, and therefore make it easier to see whether people are governing the content they are responsible for.

Easy task and responsibility assignment

This is especially useful for those organizations that may have 100,000’s of pages on their site, with just as many different areas of focus. Instead of people trying to haphazardly govern content, they will instead be able to have a clear oversight of what areas of the website they are responsible for.  

2. Develop a plan with tools

A clear content strategy plan should hopefully help you from launch to ongoing maintenance, and with the use of tools it’ll be even easier to systematically govern, maintain, and market all of your online content using one platform. Our fully integrated five-in-one suite contains quality assurance, accessibility, analytics, SEO and Response tools, and is a practical solution for adhering to a plan. 

Devolve content into bite size chunks

Tackling website governance can be difficult even with a plan which is why focusing on content in smaller more specific sections can be a great idea. Instead of webmasters or the web-team trying to quickly get an overview of all content, the use of the Siteimprove Web Governance Suite ‘Groups’ feature allows users to structure sections of their website’s content, which can then be used as easy building blocks for effective governance.

Improve the consistency of your voice and tone

An integral part of planning for content governance is consistency. It is essential to adhere to the same tone of voice for all content, otherwise quality-effecting errors can occur. A clear language policy can be extremely helpful in this regard. Searching for misspellings, branding mishaps, and jargon that you may wish to exclude from all pages, are unique features of the Siteimprove Quality Assurance tool. With the use of our ‘Word List’ feature it’ll be easy to locate those words that no longer suit your company ethos, all of which will help in enhancing your users’ experience and strengthening your brand image.

3. Determine if it’s working

Once you start governing your content then it also becomes necessary to determine the effectiveness of your content, is it working in the way you had envisaged, and if not then how can you set about fixing it. Once content is created and published then it is necessary to analyze whether it has effectively met your content strategy goals. In our first blog, The three components of Content Strategy success, we introduced industry expert Kristina Halvorson’s argument that high quality web content must be useful, usable, and enjoyable in order for it to give you the greatest online competitive advantage.

Analyze the stats

Answering the question of how to tell whether your content is doing everything it should, is easy with an analytics tool such as Siteimprove’s. With an easy interface that takes only 20 minutes to learn it’s never been easier to have the must-know stats right at your fingertips. With Siteimprove Analytics ‘Summary’ feature it’s simple to see the most, and least, popular pages, entry and exit pages, as well as a wealth of other data. 

Ensure your content is wrapped in accurate metadata

If you find that your content isn’t working as hoped then perhaps the problem could lie with your search engine optimization efforts. In that case it is usually a good idea to invest in an advanced SEO tool rather than try manually to identify problems. A feature such as Siteimprove’s SEO ‘Page Header’ can be an ideal way to detect and fix duplicate or missing meta descriptions, all of which will help you to achieve greater visibility in search results and a richer user experience when browsing.

4. Do it everyday

The last content governance step may seem so simple it’s stupid but it’s actually the hardest. While anyone can define the roles and responsibilities of people, plan like there’s no tomorrow, and analyze the stats, it takes a true Master Content Enforcer to ensure that it’s all being done everyday, which is why good tools are a must.

Be certain your content responds and remains intact

The best way to ensure that you’ll be able to govern your sites content effectively is to ensure that your site is working as intended. Siteimprove Response is a stress-free option for monitoring your key pages response times, as well as uptime and downtime. This is done 24/7 from a global servers which means being kept informed about the integrity of your website’s content is ensured. Plus because our servers never sleep it means you’ll be able to with a good conscious, knowing that if things go wrong you’ll be instantly alerted by email and SMS.  

Strategizing towards the future

Throughout our content strategy blog series we have looked at what constitutes a successful content strategy, as well as at the different natural life cycles that it goes through. From creation, to publication, and finally ongoing governance, we hope that our series has helped to shed light on one of the industries newest emerging practices.

As always we welcome comments and would love to hear your thoughts on what it takes to successfully implement a content strategy.  

Keith is a father and grandfather, a minister, and has been counseling troubled youth for over 30 years. He’s a diehard sports fan and spends his nights and weekends announcing games for the local college’s football, volleyball, basketball, and baseball teams.

As a self-described technology buff, you’ll never find Keith without his iPhone. He loves taking pictures, especially of his new grandson. If you were to add Keith on Facebook, you could practically watch the boy grow up in his news feed. 

Few people are as well traveled as Keith, who’s forever on a mission to become “mayor of everywhere” on Foursquare. Accompanying him on his adventures is his guide dog, a beautiful Black Labrador Retriever named Mercury.

Keith is blind.

Too often we forget to put a face on the people with disabilities. We lump them into categories:

• Blindness or Low Vision
• Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing
• Learning Disabilities
• Medical Disabilities
• Physical Disabilities

While these categories are conditions, they do not describe the individuals. They certainly do not describe Keith.

Accessibility is something that is relevant for everyone working with websites regardless of whether you are a web designer, web developer, web manager, or web editor. As website specialists, we like to think we are pretty good at defining our audiences. Did you know that 20% of your users have some form of disability? One person out of five visiting your site has to do something out of the ordinary to get the information you’ve made available. Let’s look at this a different way—for every 1000 visitors, 200 may have difficulty with your site, or need an alternative way to get to your information. Alternative ways may include screen readers or screen magnifiers, braille readers, or keyboard only navigation.

When you and your team redesigned your site the last time, did your UX designer include people with disabilities in the personas used for the site’s redesign? If you are not familiar with a persona, here is a brief description from Wikipedia:

“In marketing and user-centered design, personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way.”

Personas are just one tool that can help with creating websites; to be effective your personas need to accurately reflect your visitors. If possible, engage a person with a disability to assist with persona creation, then re-engage your expert when it’s time to start testing the changes you’ve made to your site. For more information about creating accessible websites, read our blog posts “Web Editors: Create Accessible Websites”, “Web Developers: Create an Accessible Website”, and The Web Designer's Guide on How to Create Accessible GUIs.

When you meet Keith, (or Bill, Sarah, or any other disabled person) for the first time, be sure to ask how much the grandson is growing, how their favorite sports team is doing, or about their latest hobby. If it’s Keith, be prepared to stop and chat for a while. He’s got some pictures to show you!

Content Safeguarding is Essential

The publication stage can often seem like the simplest stage of the content strategy lifecycle, yet it is also the time when credibility and reputation threats are at their highest. Therefore, it’s essential that organizations undertake two reviews, the initial and the comprehensive. An ideal way to streamline these processes with the use of cleverly simple web management tools.

The Initial Review

This stage should determine the overall quality of information and from a content strategy perspective should involve ensuring that published content will be compliant with international web standards. With estimates that 20% of the population has some form of disability that makes accessing the web difficult, it is essential that your site that is accessible to all. This may seem like a monster task, but with help from the Siteimprove Accessibility tool it needn’t be.  

Easy to use, with helpful instruction materials, its ‘summary’ feature provides a clear overview of all accessibility issues affecting your site, as well as highlighting which errors most require your attention. By reviewing your contents accessibility, you’ll be sure to have content that is more inclusive, will better fulfill all users’ expectations, and that can even assist in improving your SEO efforts.    

The Comprehensive Review

An in-depth and informational review will help ensure the accuracy and completeness of information. This should involve checking to make sure that there’s no spelling mistakes anywhere on your site, that all links work as intended, and that every piece of content is where it should be. With Siteimprove Quality Assurance ensuring your website’s credibility is protected needn’t be a logistical nightmare.

Finding every single spelling mistake on your website is like finding a needle in a haystack, especially if your site has many pages, or is in more than one language. Siteimprove Quality Assurance is designed to help make this task manageable, with it’s extensive dictionary that’ll find all misspellings, and a clever editing feature that can both allow certain words, and flag those others that are deemed inappropriate.

Intuitive crawlers are also an essential part of this tool, as they check every link on every single page of your site so you don't have to. As part of this review process, our tools can also help you ensure all site content, such as email addresses, telephone numbers, videos and PDFs, is correct and where it needs to be.

While the publishing stage has the potential to derail your larger content strategy it can be made much easier with the use of web management tools, and as such any organization attempting to enforce or renew their strategy should consider these options.

Stay tuned for next week’ final installment in the Siteimprove Content Strategy Blog Series as we discuss tips and tricks for successful content governance.  

Usually the first thing people focus on when creating content is research. It’s what helps formulate your ideas, as well assists you in planning how to take those thoughts and turn them into useful, usable and enjoyable content that help meet your business objectives. One great way to research is to look at how your developing site or existing site’s content is meeting and engaging people’s expectations and needs.

Map your users

The Siteimprove analytics tool is ideal for this, as its ‘User Journey’ feature is able to assist you with mapping user journeys and understanding where users come from, all of which helps in deciding on what content to create or use. 

Analytics information can also be used to help with everything from documenting your results, to making your case for management to allocate the resources needed, to analysis that supports the graphical design.

Knowing the geographic location of your users, their technical specifications, and whether or not they use computers or mobile devices when visiting your website will also give you a clearer picture of your users.

Know your users

Analytics data can provide specific and accurate answers to essential questions that anyone who has a website should know, such as:

• Who are our users?
• What content on our current website do they look at?
• How do they end up on our current website?
• What do they do/where do they go when they visit the website?
• What feedback have we received from our users?

Data found using the Siteimprove Analytics ‘Content’ feature can also assist you in learning how user needs drive the statistics and metrics, which can in turn help you make decisions about what content goes on the site, and what doesn’t.

Optimize your content

Search engine optimization is also an extremely helpful aspect to consider during the creation stage. Tools, such as Siteimprove SEO are ideal for shedding some much-needed light on whether or not your content is going to be discoverable by potential users.

Using Siteimprove’s newest intuitive SEO feature, ‘Keywords’ for example, allows you to monitor important keywords by analyzing search results so that you can effectively optimize your pages and get better search engine rankings. Therefore, this enables you to strategically plan and create content that builds your brand and optimizes your site.

While content strategy creation may be an ongoing process, it is one that can be made easier with the use of quality website management and diagnostic tools - such as those from Siteimprove.   

For more tips and tricks on reducing the anxiety of implementing a content strategy throughout the publishing stage stay tuned for the next installment. As always, feel free to comment, and if you enjoyed this post, please share it.

According to Kristina Halvorson, recognized as one of the industry’s leading advocates for content strategy, the benefits of having a strong content strategy are abundant. Halvorson argues that “High-quality web content that's useful, usable, and enjoyable is one of the greatest competitive advantages you can create for yourself online.”  

Yet understanding the term ‘content strategy’ and actually applying it in real life are two different things, which is why we’re going to dissect these three main components to success:

1. Creation

2. Publication

3. Governance

1. Creation

One common content strategy mistake is to undervalue the creation process. When planning a new website, many organizations will focus too much on the graphical specifications, instead of curating useful and usable content.

Therefore, beginning the creation phase, especially the re-creation phase for an existing website, can be challenging but there are plenty of solutions available to you. Firstly, consider what data you may need to help you in formulating content. A good analytics tool should be able to give you an in-depth insight into how your developing site or existing sites content is meeting and engaging people’s expectations and needs. From mapping user journeys, to understanding where users come from, it all helps in deciding on what content to create or use.

For more information about how analytics can assist in the content creation phase check out Web Analytics expert, Bo Vejgaard’s blog ‘Get inspiration from your analytics data when planning a new website.’ Another useful device to consider using during this stage is a tool such as Siteimprove SEO, which is ideal for figuring out whether content is optimized for keywords and search engines.        

2. Publication

The publication stage in which content finally goes live is both exciting and daunting. During this time it’s important not to become complacent, as an excellent content strategy is one that is ongoing. Due diligence during this stage is just as essential as it was during creation. Part of this diligence means ensuring that all published content is thoroughly reviewed and checked. Now while this may seem like a bigger task than creating content in the first place, there are resources that can help you.

One solution is to consider investing in a quality assurance tool. A good QA tool should be able to identify spelling mistakes, internal and external broken links, as well as provide a complete overview of all media files that are currently published on your website. All this helps ensure your website’s content credibility remains protected. Additionally it should also be able to assign responsibilities so that everyone’s publications roles are clearly defined, which sets a high ongoing publication standard.

Those interested in making their content inclusive should also consider the role accessibility plays in content publishing. Although it can be very technical based, adhering to international guidelines for web accessibility ensures that as many users as possible can navigate and comprehend your site. Take a look at some of our previous blogs to learn more, such as what exactly web accessibility is.    

3. Governance

Once created and published many organizations tend to adopt a ‘done and dusted’ policy, rather than enforcing a proactive content governance model. Without such a model organizations are unable to ensure contents consistency - which is a waste of time and money. To implement a web governance model there are four key aspects to consider:

1. Tools

2. Authority

3. Maintenance

4. Measurement

Tools such as a web governance suite are great for ensuring the other aspects are in order. Different tools within the suite, such as a quality assurance tool, make it is easy to assign authority and responsibility, while a monitoring tool will greatly assist in ensuring a website’s maintenance, and analytics and SEO take the guesswork out of measurement.          

Stay tuned for our next installments

Throughout the upcoming series we will be delving deeper into the three necessary components for content strategy success, their common issues, as well as offering you specific solutions to these problems.

Ok, that might sound stupid, but the trick to good How-To’s is ensuring that they answer actual questions from customers. One way to find some of these questions is to look at the questions users enter in the search engines to find your website. If a visitor asks a question in a search engine and ends up on a page of your website that doesn't answer that question directly, you have a chance to improve the user experience. If one person asked that question, chances are others will too. If you've written a solid answer, they could end up on your website. Who knows, they might even stick around and find some of your other content and services relevant - and before you know it they could be a new customer.

Sieving data

With hundreds or thousands of search terms used to enter your website, finding questions to answer may seem like finding a needle in a haystack. Filtering the search terms is your best friend here. In the screenshot below I’ve used a filter that only shows website visits where the user entered a search term with the word ‘how’ in it.

The result is a very useful list of questions. Now you can find the questions you think are most relevant for your website and which include keywords you want to optimize your website for. Then it is up to you to write some quality answers as blog posts, FAQs, or whichever format best suits your website.

Tracking performance

The cool thing about a filter like this is that you can use the exact same filter to track the performance of your efforts.
So when you’ve written a couple of How-To’s, you just have to look at your filtered analytics data, and then you’ll be able to see if traffic from the relevant search terms increase. Using the filter you’ll also be able to dive into behavior tracking, and see whether or not visitors stay on your website, and do what you want them to.

The possibilities with filters are endless. If you have any filter setups you want to share, or questions about filters, please fire away in the comments.

Forgetting to dot your I's and cross your T's

Imagine if from this point onwards you decided never to add a subject to your emails again. Besides ticking off your boss and colleagues you'd probably also find out that you didn't get many answers. The same applies to forgetting to title your web pages or having the same title on duplicate pages. Without an engaging and descriptive title not only will Google struggle to find you, but your conversion rate will suffer. It's also important to remember that your title tag is what people are going to see when they are looking in search engines, bookmarks, or link to your page via social networks. If you're just using your company name or some other useless generic text then you should kick yourself, hard, right now.       

Being too flashy for your own good

While there may be occasions when flash is needed for websites, these occasions are few and far between. Designing parts or heaven forbid a whole website in flash is going to make it hard, if not impossible for search engines to read you. Flash also has the tendency to annoy users - as this website, aptly titled The World's Worst Website, so excellently demonstrates. If users feel like reaching for a stiff drink after being on your site something's going wrong.

Using irrelevant keywords

Knowing how to correctly use keywords is essential for good SEO. There's nothing worse than spending time and money on formulating a great site or blog to have no-one read it. Finding the right keywords for your business can be tricky, especially when you consider that many potential customers may misspell keywords or use different terminology from what you'd expect. To find the right keywords it's essential to use web diagnostic tools, as well as your own analytics to give you an insight into what terms are actually converting for you.

Thinking Sex Appeal doesn't matter
"Sex appeal" and "URLs" may not exactly go together, but with evidence suggesting that long URLs act as a deterrent to users clicking rates, it is important to consider how your URLs appear. SEO expert and author Stephen Spencer found that short URLs are often clicked on twice as often as long ones. By comparison, long URLs can draw attention away from your search engine listing, helping to place the emphasis onto your competitors instead.   

Linking like it's 1999

Just as peeling paint can make a room look outdated so too can overly simple anchor text links. The soul crushingly common 'click here', 'read me' and 'buy me' links are for many people synonymous with outdated websites and outdated businesses. These ugly links needn't happen though as controlling your links is one of the many little things you can do to improve your SEO. So make sure that when you're linking you're using optimized anchor text.  

Ana-what-ics?

All too often people seem to think of SEO and Analytics as existing completely separately of each other. Clever people however will know that neither are anything without the other. Understanding how to do SEO better also requires understanding your users, their behavior, traffic hubs, preferred search engines and so forth. The more you know about your site and users, the better you'll be able to optimize content for searchers. 

If you've enjoyed reading this, do the kind thing and share it!  

Not only do mistakes increase consumer distrust, studies also show they cost your business thousands, if not millions of dollars.

One sure fire way to irritate customers and lose business is through bad spelling, as online entrepreneur Charles Duncombe so aptly pointed out a few years ago:

After undertaking an analysis of websites that contained poor spelling, he concluded that it was costing UK businesses millions in lost revenue. In one example alone, he measured the revenue per visitor to a British website with a spelling mistake. He found that figures indicated that just one spelling mistake cut online sales in half, but once the mistake was corrected revenue was often twice as high.

One US executive who knows the effects errors can have on a business's reputation is Boyd Savage from Fredrikson & Byron Law Firm. Worried about the time, money, and embarrassment errors were causing, they chose to invest in Siteimprove Quality Assurance: a comprehensive diagnostic tool that helps automate website assurance, which Savage now says he couldn't live without.

It is not only spelling errors that are costing businesses money, as a comprehensive three-year study by Stanford University's Technology Lab points out. After interviewing over 4,500 people about what they thought constituted a credible website, they compiled 10 guidelines to help webmasters ensure the credibility of their websites.

One of the guidelines advises businesses to avoid website errors of all types, no matter how small they seem, as typos, errors and broken links hurt a site's credibility more than most people imagine. Of course, avoiding all errors may seem impossible, but quality software tools can assist in making the job much more manageable.

Another sore point for businesses and customers alike is ensuring private information stays just that - private. Now while most of us probably aren't harboring sensitive information a la WikiLeaks , the fact remains that there is a need to protect information. Especially when we consider damning figures collected by the Open Security Foundation, a non-profit organization, that showed that in only a nine-month period 37 organizations had lost almost 132 million sensitive records through external hacks and poor maintenance work.

Make sure people are laughing with you, and not at you by quality assuring your site.

When we launched the new Siteimprove website a year ago, I was certain of one thing - We needed to be able to tightly control the website using Web Governance. First and foremost we needed to formulate and write down our Web Governance, as I mentioned in the blog post 'What is Web Governance?'.

Write down your Web Governance

Even though I had decided to scribble down our Web Governance, I quickly came to the conclusion that I was the website owner, and therefore solely responsible for the decisions and work on the website. Therefore why waste time on writing documents that were just for me?

The only things we had on paper were a blog calendar, and guidelines for writing blog posts. The decision to not write anything down soon came back to haunt me, as we started having multiple editors posting jobs, webinars, news and events without any guidelines or procedures to control it.

During the year we've established more procedures, but ultimately it has been done as a reaction to a need or problem, rather than as a proactive approach. The next step then for us now is the take those known procedures and incorporate them into a Web Governance manual. This manual will act as the backbone of established practice for the entire company, and will help new employees to adhere to it.   

Clearly define roles and responsibilities

Shortly after the launch of our new website it became clear that it wasn't feasible to merely have the US and UK websites as translated copies of the Danish website. Each country has its own news and events, and in time the diversity between country sites will only continue to increase. As a result our Marketing Coordinators in the US and UK were assigned content ownership of their respective websites.

The only problem with this was that we hadn't clearly defined the ownership roles. So while copywriting and proofreading were under control it wasn't clear who was responsible for following up website usage with Siteimprove Analytics, or who maintained our internal search function.

Now that we have added German and Swedish websites as well, the need for clearly defined roles and responsibilities is even more relevant.

Use policies and procedures

In a previous blog post I wrote about the policies and procedures of Web Governance. At Siteimprove we've primarily worked with procedures that describe how we do things; How do we ensure that images are cropped correctly, how do we post on social media, how do we structure job postings etcetera. This has helped us a lot in terms of ensuring uniformity across the board.

You may ask yourself, "then why should I spend time writing down policies if there's already a set of procedures explaining how to do different tasks?" Policies are "laws," and they can guide you when you run into tasks for which you don't have procedures. Now while procedures may explain how to do a specific task, it is the policies that provide you with a reason as to why tasks should be solved in a specific way. And therefore they ease the implementation of Web Governance in the organization, as everybody is on the same page.

One of the policies that we've spent time on is our language policy. It defines the tone of voice we use in our communication, both internally and externally, and also explains why we've chosen that specific voice. Our language policy is strongly rooted within our corporate strategy and our corporate values.

The future

During the next year we will improve our Web Governance and make it available to all within Siteimprove. This includes further defining roles and responsibilities, formulating more procedures, and the creation of further policies. This work will be tightly bound to our continued work strategy, ensuring that Web Governance and web strategy are aligned with our corporate strategy.

Next time we get a new website, we'll think about Web Governance from day one, as it really does make the task easier and more comprehensible.

If you've been involved in the creation or implementation of Web Governance, we would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section.

Include the remaining 20% of users

Surveys show that up to 20% of web users are affected by accessibility issues when surfing the web. By following the principles of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines you ensure that as many people as possible can use a website. In the following paragraphs I will give tips on which criteria are relevant for you as a web editor.

Page titles

In a CMS, you give a web page a title or name when you create it. In some systems there is also a specific field for this called "Title." It's important that this title is descriptive of what the page is about, because it's shown in the top of your browser and is the first thing on a web page to be read by a screen reader.

Text

When writing text for web pages, consider the fact that some users can't get an overview of a page visually, as opposed to structurally. Make sure that pages are divided into logical sections, each given a heading that is descriptive of the section. You can use several levels of headings: heading 1, heading 2, etc. (in the code <h1>, <h2> etc., so that assistive technologies can render them as headings).

Because of low vision, some users will perceive a web page very differently from the way other users would visually perceive it. Make sure to not give important information solely by the use of color or with an instruction requiring sensory skills. As an example, avoid writing things like: "… you can read more about the event in the blue box to the right."

It's fine to write something like this if you supplement it with something that all users can find, such as an additional text: "… you can read more about the event in the blue box to the right by the heading 'Events in March." This way you're also giving details that all users will be able to find.

If you change the language in the text, make sure you state the language of that piece of text. In the code this is done with the attribute lang="" for the text unit. A good CMS will allow you to highlight the piece of text and choose language from a drop down menu.

Links

When you add links on a page, write link texts that make sense when read out of context. For instance, avoid using link texts such as "Read more," "here," "Click here," "publication," etc. An example could be: "You can read more about the Assistive Technologies event here." Another example could be writing: "You can read more about the Assistive Technologies event here." It would be better to write "You can read more about the Assistive Technologies event here" for example. This way you are giving a link text that in itself is a good indicator of what the destination page is about.

Images

When you add images to a web page, consider the fact that some users cannot see images and need a text alternative. In most CMSs this is stated as "alternative text" or "alt text." The text given here is not visually displayed on the page, but is hidden in the code to be accessed by screen readers. (The alternative text is not the same as a tooltip: The text displayed when you hover over the image called "title").

Try to close your eyes and visualise what information you need if you cannot see the image. Describe the purpose of the image and not necessarily what the image is of. If the image is linking it is important to describe where the link goes to/what happens when clicking on the image. If the image is solely used for decorative purposes, creating an ambience or a visual context, it should have no alternative text. If the image contains information, that information should be given in the alternative text.

Avoid using images of text. This means that you should avoid, for instance, writing a text in an image editing program and save it as an image. Many of the types of software that reads text aloud (for instance those used by dyslexics) cannot read images of text. This is because you can't highlight text within an image to have it read out loud to you. (Some of these types of software can read alternative texts but far from all. They should not be confused with screen reader software used by the visually impaired. These are much more advanced).

Video and audio

If you are using video or audio clips on a web page there are several criteria to consider, such as captioning and audio description on video. Audio description is an extra track that lets a visually impaired user know what's happening on the screen. If you are not able to provide your videos with audio description, give an alternative in the form of a transcript that is uploaded or linked to from the page. But be aware that without audio description you cannot be AA compliant but only A-compliant.

If the content is solely visual (no sound) or only audio (no visual) then a text version is an accepted alternative on both levels.

Tables

When using data tables with information, it's important to indicate headings for rows and/or columns. The way to do this is very CMS specific. In some cases the editor provides an accessibility tab where this information can be entered when using data tables.

Lists

When using a list of items make sure to use the function for this that is built into the editor in the CMS. This will ensure that the right and accessible code is entered for lists. Avoid just making dots that looks like a list (such as asterisk, dash etc.).

If you would like to know what web designers and web developers as well as web owners should focus on, you can read my whitepaper  'How to ensure website accessibility'.