News Guide

News pieces are an important part of our communications and when done right, are effective and free adverts for our campaigning work and successes. To get the best results, we need to make these engaging and shareable. A few quick and easy steps when editing and publishing will make these look and function well.

General guidelines:

Consistency is important. We want our news pieces to have a clear outline and to look familiar.

User journeys should relate to the topic and naturally encourage people to reach the end of the page before being diverted elsewhere. This means, avoiding excessive use of hyperlinks within the text, adding buttons at the end of the article and including at least one CTA as a module at the footer of the piece. This can be a donation, join or newsletter module. For CTA’s such as petition signatures, a button can be included in the hero module in the place of share buttons.

Make sure the piece works well as a social media preview. You can do this by scrolling right to the bottom of the page to the SEO options and clicking on the ‘Social’ tab. Here, you can add the main photo used in the hero module for Facebook and Twitter, copy and paste your title and do the same for the meta description using the text from the ‘excerpt’ on the right hand side toward the top of the page. Now when you post the link, it will show all this info you’ve entered.

Module order

• Hero – if there is a relevant CTA, use standard Hero, if not we’ll use the alternative hero with the title beneath in H2.
• Text body – Rich text with share buttons selected.  No titles here – put this in the hero.
• Button if applicable (add this into the text body after your rich text)
• CTA – donation or membership if appropriate
• Newsletter sign up. (photo should be of one rider or a pair of riders – this is the case across the whole site)

Formatting

All news should begin with normal text. The heading and a related subheading belongs in the hero module.

Subheadings within the text should use H4

If a point needs to be stressed as a standalone point, use H6 and center align

• Lists should use built in points like this

Avoid excessive use of hyperlinks. We don’t need to provide sources for all material and quotes. If a hyperlink is needed, it should be a short one, i.e. We have learned from the recent TfL report that the boroughs of Ealing, K&C and Southwark will all be installing protected cycle routes along all red routes.

Embed social links

Simply pasting a Twitter link into Rich Text will bring up a preview as below;

https://twitter.com/LMaufe/status/1456323649326231566

Add a new row with YouTube Embed to add videos;

Quote

Use this if you want to include larger quotes into a page. Just put the actual quote into the Quote box and put the attribution into a Rich Text row afterwards, or use an introductory sentence such as

Ashok Sinha, LCC CEO, said that:

Where the page contains a lot of quotes or is more of a factual report, or the quote is very short you are best advised to include the quote in the body of the copy.