Right now, this style sheet is a draft, and not open to anyone outside User Services and OLI/FacTS. The purpose is to create a set of guidelines for creating Confluence content that can be the basis for campus-wide use, tutorials, workshops, and so forth. This will be a set of best practices to encourage standardization of Confluence content around proven styles, arrangements, and use of macros. ITS pages should model this practices as far as possible.
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- Continuity means it is much easier for us to troubleshoot problems for them.
- We can ensure that the macros and arrangements they use will look good on a variety of screens: desktop, notebook, tablet, phone, and so on.
On the other hand, we should be careful not to insist users stick to a narrow list of tools, options, and content arrangements, because:
- We are selling the internet as a diverse, flexible and versatile way of conveying content and promoting engagement. Telling people they must follow a strict style guide offers them much less incentive to bother with it.
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- (Simply touting the efficiencies of paperless communication has a poor record for on-boarding ordinary users to digital technology, for various reasons.)
- We will need to police this, occasionally telling people they "must" change their sites. The more of this that happens, the more disaffection we can anticipate among users.
I suggest:
- We offer tutorial content showing the basics of building attractive content: technical as well as design considerations. We sell standardization as a program for making content effective.
- We indicate that other, "more advanced" features are available, but should only be used with a thorough commitment to testing. We can assist with this process.
Developing a best-practice stylesheet will require testing to ensure consistency and reliability of macros, markup, or content arrangement.
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