Why you need to review web content

We all make mistakes, and even the most experienced writers need someone else to check their work. 

When someone creates or edits content on the website, it can be difficult for them to see their own mistakes or remember to check the links and formatting on the page. They must ask a colleague to review their changes, even if the changes are small, before anyone publishes the page on the University website. 

If a colleague asks you to review some content changes, you need to be able to recognise: 

• incorrect information 
• spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes 
• other typos 
• broken links 
• broken formatting 
• unclear language 
• accessibility issues 

Use the checklists on this page to review your colleague's preview page. Even if they've only made a small change, you should check each of these things before publishing the page. Links and images can break, accessibility issues can appear, and language and information can become less clear over time. 

Web accessibility 

You must make sure your content is accessible. 

As a public sector body, we're legally required to make the content on our website as accessible as possible. The government checks our content to make sure it complies with the internationally recognised guidelines from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  

Find out more about accessibility or contact beta-content@bath.ac.uk if you have any questions.

Reviewing preview pages

If a colleague asks you to review some content on the University website, they should send you a preview version of the page. 

The preview is a version of the web page that hasn't been published yet, so you can see the changes your colleague made before other people can. 

To see the preview page, you need to be connected to our network or signed in to our Virtual Private Network (VPN). 

If they've updated an existing page, you can compare the preview version with the live version to help you check their changes. Just replace 'preview' in the URL with 'www' to switch from the preview page to the live page. 

To find the edits made to a web page, you can:

• use the Comparison function on Word
• paste the text onto a website like Text Compare

You can also use a screen reader like Microsoft Narrator or Mac VoiceOver to dictate the content. This will allow you to test how your content is presented to people who use a screen reader.

Reviewing web copy

Page purpose

1. Read the brief or any instructions for the content to make sure the page meets the requirements. 
2. Check that the page is the correct content type. 
3. Review the page's user story to make sure all the content meets this need. If the content addresses more than one user need, think about whether to divide it into more than one page. 

Information

Review all the factual information on the page to make sure everything is correct and up to date, for example: 

• contact details 
• dates
• instructions 
• names and places 

Language

Make sure the language on the page is as clear as it can be. To do this:

1. Check the page title and summary describe the page and are clear to people who find the page out of the context of your pages. 
2. Make sure the language used throughout the page is as simple as possible so that anyone can understand it. Use Hemingwayapp.com to check for clarity, passive voice, and reading grade. Aim for Grade 8.
3. Refer to our Editorial Style Guide to make sure the language is consistent with the rest of the website. 
4. Use Grammarly to check spelling, grammar, and punctuation. 

Read the Web Content Accessibility Guidance (WCAG) on achieving the highest standards of readability in content.

Reviewing formatting

All formatting affects accessibility, so you must check that the structure of your web page is correct. You can do this by: 

1. Making sure all the headings use the correct heading styles and hierarchy. 
2. Making sure all bullet points, numbered lists and tables look right. 
3. Checking for italics and bold text. Avoid using either except for the reasons in our Editorial style guide. 

Links

Links are a common cause of accessibility issues. You must check links carefully to make sure they comply with the WCAG link purpose requirements. 

1. Test all links, including the Call to action, to make sure they work and go to the correct pages.
2. Check you can see all email addresses and phone numbers on the page and that they're not hidden behind other text. 
3. Make sure the link text meets our guidelines. Your link text must be descriptive so that web users understand where it will take them and so that assistive technology can read the description aloud. 
4. If there's a Local navigation (a light blue strip at the top of the page), make sure there are no broken links there. 

Link-checker browser extensions

You can install extensions on a variety of web browsers to help you check the links on a preview page work. These include:

• Check My Links for Google Chrome
• Broken Link Checker for Mozilla Firefox
• Integrity for Apple Safari

While link-checking extensions are available for Microsoft Edge, they are disabled on University computers with the Edge browser.

Don't rely on tools like this. You must make sure your links work and go to the correct destination page.

Tables

Tables should only be used to display tabular data. If it's clearer and more accessible to display your content in plain text, rather than in columns and rows, don't use a table.

Read our guidelines for creating tables. 

Reviewing media

Images

Check all images are accessible and meet our image requirements. Your images must: 

• not include text over any images 
• be in the correct aspect ratio 
• include credits for stock photos and artificially generated (AI) images 

Make sure all images have descriptive alternative (alt) text unless they are decorative. Hero images are usually decorative, so they don’t need alt text. In this case, use "" as the alt text.  

For complex images, like diagrams or charts, there isn’t space in the alt text to describe the image, so you need to add both a longer text description and alt text.

See WCAG guidelines for using complex images. 

Videos

1. Make sure all videos play correctly and are up to date. 
2. Check all videos are embedded from Vimeo, not from YouTube. We don't use YouTube on our website because we can't control the suggested videos that appear after ours. Your video embed must also include an accessible Title attribute. 
3. Check all videos have captions. Videos with audio should be captioned with important non-audio content described in a separate transcript or audio track. A pre-recorded or live video with no audio does not need captions. 

Audio

1. Make sure all audio works correctly and is up to date. Your audio embed must also include an accessible Title attribute. 
2. Check there's a written transcript for audio-only media, like podcasts. 

Correcting mistakes

When you've reviewed the preview page, it's best to give written feedback to the person who made the changes detailing what they need to fix before someone can publish the page.

If you're a Typecase user and have access to the page you're reviewing, you can make small corrections yourself. You can access the edit screen of the page in Typecase by replacing 'preview' with 'typecase' in the URL.

If you make bigger changes yourself, make sure you ask someone else for a review before anyone publishes the page.

When the page is ready to be published, send the URL to the assigned publisher in your team.