Quality content is key to the success of any intranet, making it both useful and usable. To achieve this, intranet teams must ensure intranet authors have the right tools, training and support to make this happen.

As one of many author resources, a simple checklist for quality content should be provided on the intranet. This checklist is a support tool for authors to use back at their desks following face-to-face or online author training. See earlier article An outline for intranet author training for more information on what should be included in training.

This article outlines possible topics to consider for your checklist. Depending on the environment, authoring experience and level of authoring complexity in your organisation, some topics may be more relevant than others. Use this as a starting point to create checklists for your authoring community.

Writing style

• content written for the target audience
• easy to scan with clear headings, sub-headings, labels and lists
• content is ‘chunked’ by topic
• inverted pyramid structure with the essential information at the top of the page
• uses familiar, easy to understand words avoiding acronyms or jargon
• uses the active voice for more direct communication
• text is concise, cutting out any unnecessary words
• summaries or tables of contents are used for long pages
• content makes sense if it is the first page a person visits (out of context)
• contains all the information about a topic and links to related content
• written to meet the intranet style and obviously up-to-date
• appropriate keywords and metadata have been included

[August article by Rebecca Rodgers, read the full article]