Content principles

Our five content principles will guide the way we plan, produce, deliver and govern content.

Content must have a clear purpose

Content must exist for a reason such as meeting a user need and/or business goal. 

We will pass all content requests through the proposition.

Content must start with the user

We will create content that meets users' needs so that people who come to our website can do the thing they want to do quickly and easily. 

This means we will start by finding out:

• who the user is
• what the user needs to know

Content is informed by data

User needs will be backed up with data.   

We will:

• review existing evidence (for example, analytics, search logs, customer hub data, previous research reports etc)
• interview and observe actual or likely users
• talk to people inside and outside our organisation who work with actual or likely users

We write for everyone

Our audience could be anyone living or working in Wales, or people who want to visit. 

Our users have different reading abilities and access needs. They use a range of devices to find and use information on our website.

This means we must write content in a way that most people understand, that works for whichever way they want to access it.

We will:

• use our style guide
• write for the web
• create accessible documents

We test, iterate and learn

Content must be monitored to know if it is still solving the problem for users.

We will:

• usability test with users to see what’s working and what improvements need to be made 
• use real-time analytics to show how users interact with the content