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CU Village designed and developed the Great Falls Teachers Federal Credit Union site using our Content Management System. Take a look by clicking on the image above!
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Content Maintenance—a Simple Procedure to Keep Your Site Current
Once your site is up and running, it’s easy to sometimes overlook keeping the content fresh and updated. But content maintenance is something that you’ll want to make a priority—so your members will know they can rely on your site for accurate information.
Whether you assign the task to one person or a content team, it’s relatively simply to conduct regular maintenance on your site’s content. All it takes is a little time and dedication to check all the pages and links on your site on a monthly basis to make sure that everything is current and working.
Getting Started
Go through your site, page by page, link by link and look for:
- Consistent fonts/sizing – Headers, subheads, and text should be consistent sizes throughout the site. Your main headline on each page (for example, Loan Products) should be the same size and font. Then use another size for sub-heads (for example, Auto Loans) on the page. When it comes to the Web, remember that san serif fonts such as Arial, Helvetica, or Verdana, are easier to read online than serif fonts such as Times New Roman. Generally your main text should be black. However dark blue or dark green can be used if they do not clash with the other colors on your site.
- Consistent formatting – Check to make sure that your text is left aligned rather than centered. For photos, be consistent in your use of borders; either use them or don’t. If you use borders, be sure that they are all the same thickness.
- Typos, grammar and punctuation – Mistakes affect your message and your credibility. When it comes to spelling, grammar, and punctuation, it never hurts to double check. Don’t rely solely on computerized spell-checking programs; they can make mistakes too—and they don’t understand the context of your message.
- Outdated content – While many members might go to your site when they want to check out rates, apply for a loan or perform home banking tasks, you want to give them a reason to visit your site on a regular basis in order to sell more products and services. Do you have a new promotion or a new product to present? Has the latest newsletter come out? What about a community activity the credit union is participating in or sponsoring? These are all things that can add interest to the site and help gain repeat visitors. In addition to your rates pages, there are many things at the credit union that change regularly. You should use that information to keep your site interesting because your members can't get that information anywhere else.
You can also provide a variety of consumer articles, financial information, tools and resources they can use on a daily basis to help them manage their finances. This information needs to be varied and updated regularly to keep your members interested.
- Broken links – Check all the links on your site to make sure they go where they are supposed to and provide the information intended. If necessary, add new links and resources to your site so your members find new information and resources to suit their needs every time they visit.
Taking it a Step Further
Perhaps you want to do more than just make sure your content is fresh. You might also want to make sure your site is search engine optimized (SEO).
To do so, you can:
- Review your site for search engine optimization (SEO)
- Refresh copy on each page to maximize optimization through formatting and keywords
- Review site architecture of interior pages for optimal member usage
If your credit union’s website content isn’t current and optimized, you might be losing visitors and even potential members.
For information about how CU Village can help you with content maintenance and Search Engine Optimization, contact your business consultant at 800.262.6285 or e-mail info@cu-village.com.
Formatting Text in the Content Management System
Proper text formatting can be the difference between a website that looks professional and polished and one that does not. Idiosyncrasies between programs like Word and many Web page editors, however, can make getting your formatting right a real challenge. For example, text copied directly from Word carries Microsoft’s own code that can conflict with the HTML formatting you want. Many Web page editors, have special “paste from Word” options that can help remove most of Microsoft’s formatting code, but usually not all. Fortunately, there are ways around such issues.
To help you get past some of those challenges, when you’re using the CU Village Content Management System (CMS), you have the following options when you want to add text:
- Type your text directly into the body of the editor.
- Copy and paste from another Web page using the standard Paste icon.
- Copy and paste text from an existing Word document. In order to do this, you have a few copy and paste choices:
- Paste the text into Notepad and then use either the Paste as Plain Text icon or the Paste icon. You may find that this is this easiest method for you. Just format everything in the editor rather than trying to try to reformat and clean out some of the font tags. *Recommended
- Use the Paste as Plain Text icon. This will clear any highlights and bolding. Bullet points will appear, but they will be smaller and the bulleted items will not be indented. You will need to re-format the list. *Recommended
- Use the Paste from Word icon. This will keep elements such as highlights, bold, and bullet points along with the indentation for the bulleted list. However, it might not remove all of Word’s extraneous coding.
Note: We recommend that you format your text in the CMS editor, rather than in Word. This will save you the time (and possible frustration) of having to re-format. Also, these same tips can be generally applied to any Web page editor you may use, whether from CU Village or not.
Formatting the Font
Your content should be clearly laid out on the page with appropriate spacing and bolding. There are several tools to help you format your font.
- Directly typing into the CMS Body will use the default Body Text.
- The “Format” dropdown uses styles that are generic to Websites. This can be used to quickly format areas of the site.
- The “Font” dropdown applies standard web fonts such as Arial or Times New Roman.
- “Size” is indicated as xx-small (usually for footnoted information), x-small (body text), small (standard headers), medium (very large headers) and large (to prominently display text). However, users should not use this option. It gives different results in Internet Explorer than in Firefox. Instead, you should use the headings under "Format."
For information about our products and services, contact your CU Village.com business consultant.
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