SAC2: Creating a College Web Style Guide: Principles, Processes, and Prototypes

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference in Springfield, Missouri.

Jesse Racine:  Hello, good morning.  Thanks for coming.  I thought there would maybe be like 10 people here and I’m looking, wow, there is a whole roomful of them.

My name is Jesse.  I’m a web content specialist at McHenry County College.  It’s just outside of Chicago in the lovely state of Illinois.  You’d like the weather here, it’s a little bit more than what we have now.  I’m here with my coworker, Molly Strolls and she is a web content person too so she may pipe up every now and then.

Just real quick how I got into this.  When I started at MCC, we did not have a web style guide so we thought it would be a good thing to make a web style guide.  Then I also needed something to do my master’s thesis on so this kind of went together, and it works out really good when you can get paid to work on schoolwork so I recommend it.

So this is Creating a College Web Style Guide: Principles, Processes and Prototypes.  Before we get started, I’m just going to blow the alliteration right out the water.  We will not be talking about principles.  The original thing that I submitted was my thesis proposal, and if anyone knows anything about proposals, they don’t always go the way you expect them to.  It was partly because I thought principles is a great word, real deep sounding, that’s what I want it to be about, way beyond me because I was confused.  I didn’t know am I going to come up with principles of how to create a style guide or am I going to come up principles, what content principles am I going to put in the style guide?  I couldn’t make up my mind so instead of trying to blow it past you guys, we will just skip it.

Then prototypes, we will not be looking at prototypes and we will find out more why later.

So now my alliteration is gone.  One other thing we will be incorporating with this, I gave just a brief little survey, monkey survey.  I had 59 people respond so I’m going to incorporate some of those responses into the presentation.  As you can see the numbers there, most people said they had a web style guide.  For most people, it wasn’t updated and nor was it used, so good.

This is what we’re doing: defining value, process and content.  So the alliteration, the PPP is gone.  We’re going to work with this: defining value, process and content.

Just a quick overview, we’re going to talk about why have a web style guide.  Can I get a show of hands in here, who here has a web style guide presently?  Okay.  Who here does not have a web style guide?  You’re in the right place.  So we’ll talk about why.  Since it’s a really good thing to have then we’ll focus on how do you create one, what are the steps you need to go through to actually from start to finish to get something that you can use.  Then my favorite part: defining content.  What does a web style guide contain?  That’s part of the process but we did a little something different and hopefully people will benefit from it.

So jumping right in, the main reason you want to create a web style guide is it brings consistency to your website.  Your publication is going to improve because it is consistent.  Your school is going to be more professional, it’s going to be more legitimate when people come to your website, words are spelled the same way.  They know that they’re on your website which is a good thing.  They might go a couple of layers down and end up in the English department and it looks nothing like the rest of the school and am I still in the right place.

The reason consistency is such a big deal, just to do a little thought experiment, would you trust a document that’s riddled with typos?  No.  Let’s say you had a rash and you want to go WebMD so I would know what I can do, steps I can take, cream I need to buy.  If you found a document on WebMD and it was just riddled with typos, would you really want to trust what the doctor is saying?  Probably not.

The reason you also want to be consistent is to give your users a predictable online experience, it is going to satisfy their expectations.  They know they’re on your website.  Your website is legitimate.  Everything is where it should be.  Some of the responses, the reason people created a web style guide is that there was no overall uniformity to the college’s website.  This department was doing their thing and this department was doing their thing, and of course the athletics doesn’t want to have anything to do with anyone else, they want to be their own beast.

Another person said it is created to give people information so everyone is on the same page, our coding standards, our graphics, our fonts, our colors.  So consistency is a big deal.

This is also another big deal.  If you have a web style guide, you will save your institution time and money.  The first way you can see that is new employee or contractor training.  When I first started at MCC probably a year and a half ago, we did have a web style guide in place, she’s sitting right here.  So I just spent a lot of time with Molly to learn how we do things on the website for MCC.  Now, what happens when Molly takes a day off?  I kind of have to look all through the site to figure out, “How do we do that again?”  So it took a lot of time for me to make sure that everything is consistent.

So it helped with training, just your workflow is faster.  Someone said it’s a baseline.  It’s a starting point for all your projects.  You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.  These questions have already been answered, workflow is faster.

This was a big thing.  I almost broke this out as its own separate piece, but you can manage expectations with a web style guide.  If a department comes to you and they want the dancing chickens on their website, you can say, “Well, let’s look at the web style guide and see if we can do that.”  And the answer would be no.

This saving time and money, you really can’t quantify it.  I haven’t come across any research that says, “Since using the web style guide, our projects have been completed 30 percent faster or we saved X amount of dollars over the course of the project.”  If you’ve come across something like that, please let me know, I’d love to work it into my thesis but haven’t found it yet.

Someone says it serves as a baseline for every project.  I thought this was great, “Argumentative faculty can argue all they want but the style guide says what it says and we’re not going to change it.”  This was a very strong response because people were saying, “We want to use a web style guide to legitimate our authority.  We are subject matter experts in this field.  The website is not just put together willy-nilly with bubblegum and whatnot.  There are good reasons why we do things the way we do.  Trust us.”

Along those same lines, “It was created so we’d have an iron clad reason to tell people no when they ask us for things.  We’re not being arbitrary.  It’s in the style guide.”  So this touches on a vein.  If you have a web style guide in place, you have something else, a document that backs up why you do what you do, so basically, a web style guide.  Your client requests, “You can really put the hammer down when you have a web style guide in place and not to be mean about it but people understand there’s a method to the madness of why you do the things you do.”  Hopefully that would cut down on some of the silly projects that come across your desk.

Before we get too far along, it might help to figure out what is a web style guide.  There’s really nothing in the literature on web style guides.  The only thing that you’ll find is there’s a whole boatload of stuff on corporate style guides so we’ll start with that.

It’s a rule-driven document that sets the parameters for consistency and acceptability for all the written materials produced by an individual or group.

We’ve kind of seen that.  What’s consistent?  Everyone’s on the same page.  What’s acceptable?  We will do things this way; we won’t do that.  So you can give your bosses if you want them to get on board with you or you could dumb it down a little bit.  A web style guide is a style guide for the web.  Great.

This is how I think of it for myself.  The definition of a web style guide is debatable.  This is the best I could come up with after reading.  First, you have your editorial style guide.  Has anyone here seen the Chicago Manual of Style?  You’re familiar with something like that, a big orange book, editorial style guide.  You take that and you take your college graphics standards.  Who here has graphics standards for the school?  Then you just add secret web sauce.  So you put all these together.  This is what makes a web style guide different than just a regular corporate style guide or just a general style guide.

For the visual learners in here, I did this nice little kind of looks like a martini thing.

We can look at some examples.  You probably want to see what it looks like.  Other people do.  I’ve collected at least 80 of them but we will just look at two.  There are all different shapes, sizes, some of them are orange, some of them are fuzzy.  There are so many different style guides out there.

Female:  Why did you pick these two?

Jesse Racine:  Just because they show a range.  One is more technical and the other one is more, “Oh no, the CSS.  Come on.”

It looks really good when the style sheet is working as it should, but you can see some of what they put in here.  They get real specifics.  Swinburne University is in Australia, I think, in Melbourne.  They talk about their style sheets.  They get real specific banners, images, standards, accessibility.  They really go into detail here.  Infrastructure, this is what server they’re running which I thought was great but really no one else did something like that.

They have a whole development process.  When you click through their style guide and we’ll look at one of the things here.  Here’s the server development.  That’s cool.  I think that goes a long way with your client.  Okay, we’re a legitimate shop.  We know what we’re doing.  You’ve got it all spelled out.  We’re not just flying by the seat of our pants.  You’ve got your wire frames.  Print this out, scribble it in, get back to us later.

So this is what I found more of the technical side, varied, there’s a lot of detail.  They get very specific.  All of this, I think the presentation will be uploaded by the conference so you can certainly download it because I’ll give a whole list of style guides at the end.

Then we’ll just look at this one.  Is anyone here from San Diego State?  This one is more of I would say writer focused, like a secretary putting it in.  It definitely gives you worksheets and required elements.  It’s real easy to read, not a whole lot of technical detail.  This works for this school, so don’t think that there’s just one way to do it because it’s not.

There are tons of them.  I’ll give you a list of 20 at the end to click through at your heart’s content.

So you want something like that.  Of course, you’re in here, you want something like that.  So what I did since there’s not a lot of research on how do I create a web style guide, I started from the literature on creating a corporate style guide.  I probably looked at 10 how-to papers and put them all together and tried to pick some common themes that everyone touched on.  So you could use this process to get you started on how to create a web style guide.

36.4% of the web survey respondents said they had not time to do it.  So hopefully with this process in place that you’d be able to get a head start.

The first thing you want to do is you need to get managerial buy-in, and the reason you want to do this is that you need permission to work on this.  It’s not like something you want to stay late or come in on Saturday s to work on.  It’s really good to get permission from the boss to go ahead and work on this.

Then also, the second reason you’d want to do it, if they’re not on your team, once you create this thing and you put it out there, if they’re not on board, there’s no way it’s going to stick with anyone else.  It’s just going to come down to, “My boss is bigger than your boss, and your boss doesn’t even care what you did, so hah, give me dancing chickens.”  So you really want to get your boss on board.

If you can’t get managerial buy-in, it’s not the end of the world.  A couple of things I found, and you all may have some different ideas with this, you’re going to have to create some type of style guide just for yourself to save your sanity.  This is very basic, making a grid, alphabetize it and as you come across eight things, you put it into eight grids and you just build a style guide for projects, and then hopefully after you’ve done a few projects, you can come up with a messy little style guide for yourself.  Then hopefully you can take that messy little thing and spread the mess around, pass it out to your coworkers and stuff.  I think if enough of you work on it, you can get some momentum going and hopefully, you could convince your boss that this would be worth our time because we can be consistent, save money, put the hammer down, all good things.

The second thing you want to do is form a committee and only do this if you have to.  The committee that we had was two, so it doesn’t have to be very big.  The reason you would do this, if you’re not the primary writer or editor, you need their input, you need their expertise.  If you’re not the content person, you need to hook up with the content people and get what they have to say.

Also, you need them on board so when you roll this thing out, they feel like they have a stake in it.  They’ll back you up and if they feel like they’re part of it, then they’ll want to abide by it.  Implementation is a whole another monkey.  You do need help writing this thing, unless you’re like a lone ranger kind of person, you really want to have help because it’s big.  You don’t want to do it yourself.

The third thing you want to do is important.  Most people skip over this and kind of think of it as an afterthought.  Determine the audience.  Who is going to be the end user of this document?  Get one person that you think in your mind or get on with your committee, this is who we’re going to write this for.  Keep that person at the forefront.

From what I found, there’s a distinction between the CMS template user, secretary who is just copying, pasting in Word into your CMS and that’s the content and the hand-coder, someone who is getting their hands dirty and actually has access to the work.

Female:  Can I ask a question?

Jesse Racine:  Sure, yes.

Female:  I have a 60-page style guide no one wants to believe or look at. I have a virtual web TV. They call the secretary and they want one page. They don't want the CMS page, it's an excellent cover. Do they want the executive summary?

Jesse Racine:  You should if that’s what your users are asking you for.  Try to boil it down.  They don’t care about the details.  They just want writing for the web, how do I maybe use the CMS or just give me the bare bones.  That might be your web style guide.

Female:  Otherwise they want the RTFM, else they don't want to read it.

Jesse Racine:  Right.  You don’t want to do that.

The question was we have people who just want the bare bones, they’re just inputting the content.  She already has new existing style guide, 60 pages, they don’t use it.  Is it okay just to give them a one-page summary?  Yes, you should.  That would be easy on your part.  You could whip out a couple of pages a week hopefully.

Different users demand different levels of detail.  Keep that in mind.  If you can get that squared away up front, it’s going to make your job so much easier actually putting this thing together.

Our respondents, they had somebody in mind when they were writing it so it’s either primary web editors or the primary content people.  So it really helps.

Here’s why there’s no best web style guide.  Best for whom?  Best for what purpose?  Different strokes for different folks.  It kind of comes down to that.  You’re going to have people, style guides, you have to tailor it to your institution and what your end users need to know.

When we first started this, we said, since we work at a community college, we got that four-year complex.  We’re like, “We’re going to be at a four-year school.  We’re just going to do what the four-year people did.”  So we want to just look at the best web style guide.  So what did we do?  We ended up surveying 70 web style guides and our criteria, what we did, we’re going to see if they validate the actual web pages themselves and then we ran them through the wave tool.  Who here uses wave ever, sort of?  See if they’re accessible.  And what we came away with this, I think 36% passed the HTML validation.  The CSS was higher, I think it was 48%, then only 18% passed wave.  So we’re just like, “Well, great.  That means most school really aren’t committed to web standards.  I’m not going to use their style guide.”

What turned out is some of the schools who passed perfectly with flying colors, green light, this style guide wasn’t very helpful for us.  Then on the flip side, you had schools that had 56 errors, came up the red bar on the W3C light, but their style guides were great.  So obviously the weeks we spent doing that were kind of wasted but got us to the point where we are now.

This is where it gets fun.  You’ve got to create the content.  This is hard.  This is work.  The first thing you want to do is establish a comprehensive web style guide using the AP Manual Style or the Chicago Manual Style, something like that.  You want a thick book to back you up because there’s going to be editorial notion that you’re not going to think about when you are putting this together but then it’s going to come up down the road you want to have a thick book that you can build from.

You also want to determine the medium of putting this thing together.  If it’s going to be a collaborative effort, you need to have, let some document revision process, are you going to do it in Microsoft Word?  Are you going to start a wiki, get people different permissions so they can get it?  Are you going to do it in Google Docs?  There are a lot of word processors.

Work from existing style guides at your institution.  Don’t make it harder than it has to be.  I’m sure somewhere out there in your institute, you may have never seen it, it might not be very relevant but there is a style guide floating around out there.  Grab it, see if it has anything good that you can steal from it or use or put in your own style guide.

This is key too, work from existing needs.  What are things that people are constantly asking you about?  What are things that you have to change in your style guide all the time, the little post-it notes that you got that you keep scribbling out and rewriting things?  That is where you want to start from because that’s where people are at.  That’s the questions that they’re asking.  So make it relevant to the needs of your institution or your department.

You want to include common editorial content areas, and there are a whole slew of them: grammar and punctuation.  You can read through this: numbers, dates, abbreviations.  I’m sure most people here have something along these lines already.  Organizational style: logos, colors, typography, geographic standards.  Words and phrases, this is pretty standard stuff but you don’t want to miss it.  At least, when you’re putting it together, look at it and you may scratch it down and be like, well, that’s not really relevant for what we want to do.  But at least, look at it, start with it and then cross it off instead of after the fact, you should have put something in to deal with that.

The tricky part is generating web-specific content.  What goes in this thing?  When I surveyed the literature for this and technical communication, there’s nothing out there.  So means we had to do it ourselves.  So what we ended up doing was we did a massive web style guide survey.

We surveyed 70 higher ed style guides.  We cut it off at 70 because we have a life outside of work so we don’t want to spend too much time.  We found it off of Google searches for higher ed web style guides and just clicked and clicked until we got a long spreadsheet.  I also included some of the survey monkey submissions; some of you who are brave enough to give me the URLs to your web style guide and I used that.  Thank you so much.  So we got 70 of these buggers.

Then we did the great fun thing of recording the specific content areas of each one of them.  We looked at the table of contents and then if it linked to like a web policy manual, we would look at the web policy manual just to see what the guts are, the supporting documents.  If the policy manual was not referenced on the style guide sheet itself, we didn’t go looking for it because we do have a life outside of work.  Some of these sites are massive, you could spend so much time doing it.

After looking at all these web style guides and creating this master list, we came up with a list of groupings, I guess you could say.  Of all the content areas that everyone shared that they all had, we came up with - we’ll get to that.

Then from that point, we determined the most common content areas shared by all.  Sound good?  This took a long time.

We came up with 55 terms.  Some people might group these differently than we did.  There is an element of subjectivity in this.  The way what we thought would go into logo, you might put in graphics or something.  We tried to keep it, I do not know.  You just have to put a line in the sand and stick with it.

Here’s the breakdown of what we found.  Here are all 55 terms.  You see the long tail.  The ones down at the end only had one or two style guides reference that, but then you see up towards the top that we’re kind of seeing the cluster of these are what other schools have included in their web style guides.  So we thought it might be worth our time if we started that.

So we came up with our top 14, and here’s a little tag cloud of those.  Here’s the breakdown.  Now notice this is shared by 20% or more so really you don’t have 80% of schools showing one term.  We didn’t come across that, but you kind of see you’ve got colors, fonts, logos; the kind of things that you’d find in your graphic standards.  They show up here.

The surprising thing and editorial guide writing for the web, you’ve only got maybe 30% of the people included in editorial guide in their web style guide.  So that means its okay for you not to have an editorial guide as part of your web style guide.  On the flip side of that, there were some web style guides where this was the web style guide.  That was it, they didn’t touch on any of these other stuff.  It was just writing for the web, and that worked for them.  So just so you know.

You’ve got your top 14.  If you’re writing this thing, here’s a great starter list from where to start from.  You don’t have to include everything.  You can use some of the other, the 55 terms, you can make up your own, but we thought this would be a good starting point.  You don’t have to do all the research we did.

Yes, it will be in the presentation.

Female:  What will be in, sometimes by the end of the presentation or surely by the end of the day behind web.org.

Jesse Racine:  Thank you.  Your next step: assign content areas to writers.  You came up with the list that you want to work with.  Farm it out, let them write it, bring it back, review or revise their work, bring it altogether.  And you do get a banana.  I thought about bringing bananas in and throwing them at people but probably isn’t going to work too well.

Then the final step is you want to distribute the style guide and get feedback on it.  Probably at this point, you’ve got a very good working document.  It’s strong.  You’ve got a lot of feedback from people.

Male:  I guess this was set as a point but any suggestions from people who want to participate? But really they are arguing over the nits in there.

Jesse Racine:  Yes.  The question was, and this is for the sake of this listening at home, what do you with those who come to the table but they really shouldn’t be at the table, they just want to get their 2 cents in? When we did it, we got a very small committee.  We are the control people.  We do the website.  It’s two people and our director, but she trusts us. 

I think at that point, you have to ask, are they relevant to the document?  If they’re just a VP or somebody who wants to sign off, it works differently, different situations do different ways.  You’ve going to have to get the blessing from different people.  I guess you try to minimize whatever damage they can do.  Most people who have their little editorial nitpicks is because that is the only way it can be done and damn you if you try to cross them, so you really want to work that in if you can.  I would just maybe hold their hand and sure, whatever, you want it, give it to them.  It depends on how big of a battle.

Male:  There's the theory on...

Jesse Racine:  When I was doing the research for this, I came across, who here has heard of Union Carbide?  17,000 people, they said they had 150 to 200 different style guides at the same time.  So they decided to come up with a master style guide.  It took them nine years to come up.  It took them two years just to work on all the feedback and edit.  How about that for a project?  Hopefully yours won’t be that long.  If it is, don’t email me.  I don’t want to know.

This is just the basic rundown of what we did.  Our director gave her blessing because we made it part of our team goal for the year.  It also helped that I needed it for my thesis and she wanted me to graduate, so that was good.  We had a committee of two.  She was the style guide and I got the style guide out of her head.  We had a lot of the bits and pieces of it already written.  We had a departmental style guide.  We had a little chuck list.  We had post-it notes and we had Molly so trying to pull all this together.  We weren’t starting from scratch.

We used Google Docs to write it.  It worked out great.  I have nothing bad to say about it.  I really enjoyed using that tool.

It took us about two months to write up.  You’re probably thinking, two months can’t be that substantial, but no, we’re proud of it.

Here’s our final content areas, and some of the things that we included, only one or two other schools included as well but we thought, wouldn’t it be cool if we had something on mobile phone, mobile uses, assisted devices?  We put a markup guide in there.  Only two other web style guides put a markup guide in there, but when we were creating our web style guide, we want to write it for the new employee coming into the school who may not be real up on the markups so we wanted to include that.

We can look real quick what ours like.  This is just a rough draft.  We broke it into visual style guide and editorial style guide.  That’s at the end.  Here are our content areas: accessibility right at the top.  You may not go into as much detail with this stuff.  Our school doesn’t have an accessibility policy stated, stamped into concrete so we wanted to put something down on paper.

Female:  What did you use to write for?

Jesse Racine:  Our audience?  It was new employee, new person coming in, don’t really know much about it.  You can look at this if you want later.  We did this nice little breakdown.  It looks better on Google Docs.  I think we’re going to keep it on Google Docs and just give people permission to view it but not edit it because that way, we can update it quickly.  We can just go in there and type.

So here is the rah-rah-rah.  If we can do it, you can do it too.  Get managerial buy in; form a committee; determine the audience; write the content.  There’s a nine-step thing underneath writing the content but we gave you a top 14 starter list to get started, to get feedback.

Here’s a list of 20 web style guides.  This isn’t the best and the worst.  This is just a list.  It’s not being ranked.  Some of them are PDFs.  So feel free to look around and see what other people have done.  Take some of their things.

This is the one article you should read if your boss need, they feel really good when you base it on literature and research.  This is an excellent article.  It’s kind of like the whole shebang.  I highly recommend it.

That’s it.  That’s what we did.  Does anyone have any questions or comments or anything?  Yes?

Female:  Did you ever put it on the website? Or create in Google Docs?

Jesse Racine:  No, we have not incorporated it into our website.  The question was, you created it on Google Docs but did you turn it into the website or put it into HTML?  No, we have not.  Probably not.  I don’t know.  It was really helpful to find publicly accessible web style guides but I don’t think anyone outside of our department would care to locate it through the website.  If any of our internal clients want to look at it, we can get them permission or we’ll just make a PDF and send it to them so they have something at hand.  I mean you could, yes.

Male:  Has it an enforcement tool?  Have you got to use it yet to tell somebody, sorry can’t do it, it’s here in the style guide?  Have you had the opportunity to see how well the actual was in practice?

Jesse Racine:  I wish.  The question was have we been able to put the hammer down, use it as an enforcement tool.  No, we haven’t.  It’s still brand spanking new.

Female:  As a related question, if someone says why can't we do this and you say it's in the style guide. The next question is who wrote the style guide?

Jesse Racine:  Well I would say it’s a committee put it together.

Female:  Did you get it approved by someone who actually has authority?

Jesse Racine:  That’s why you’d want your managerial buy-in, sure.  The question again was, for those listening at home, I’m sorry about that, repeat your question again.

Female:  If someone says why can’t I do this, and you say well, the style guide.

Jesse Racine:  Who wrote the style guide?  So the question why can’t I do this?  Well, it’s in the style guide.  Well, who wrote the style guide?  I would say the committee had buy-in on it, and then you need to get the higher ups to bless it.

Like in our institution, this thing for it to be policy, it would have to go before our board, and that’s not going to happen.  We’re okay with that because few things ever make it that far before it gets shocked.

Yes, sir?

Male:  You do have an electronic version of the style guide or hand it out to people and in a binder.

Jesse Racine:  The question for those listening at home.  His institution’s style guide is paper based, it’s put in a binder and they hand it out.  What have we found?  What are some of the other responses?

The ones that we surveyed were web-based.  I know in the literature for corporate style guides, that’s where they did it.  They put it in a three-ring binder and they actually had every quarter they update it and send out new “replace page 55 with new page” that type of thing.  I think the benefits for an electronic format probably outweigh that now.  Just because you can send people URL, they can look and find it, and to update it you’re not killing trees to do so.

It might be really good for a secretary to just have the binder on the desk.  Sure.

Yes, sir?

Male:  Is it based on how long it should be or how to keep it from getting longer?

Jesse Racine:  The question was how long should it be and how to keep yourself from making it longer than it needs to be.  I think it really comes down to your end-user.  How much detail do they need to know?  Ours is 13 pages, I think, but really some of them we found were six pages long, some of them were like 30-plus pages long.  It really comes down to what you think your needs are.  If you can boil down those content areas and say we’re going to stick to this, and you want that feedback as you push it out and it comes back to you, you might say people don’t really care.  That’s it.

Yes, sir?

Male:  How often should it be updated?

Jesse Racine:  How often should you update the style guide?  It depends on how much time you have.  I would think that if you don’t stay on top of it and keep it current, people are going to pick up on that real quick and pretty soon, they’re just going to have little post-its put on their monitor because they know the style guide is not up-to-date.  I think it should hopefully be quarterly if not twice a year.

Yes, sir?

Male:  How can you judge that the style guide is successful?

Jesse Racine:  We like it.  For what it should do since I was the prototypical new person coming in and learning and hardly knew anything, this would have been a great tool in hindsight for me to use.  So for a new person coming in, I think this would be a great step for how we do things on the website for MCC, but you need that feedback to find out how successful it is.

Yes, ma’am?

Female:  I've been looking at it but can you publish it to the public?

Jesse Racine:  You can.  I’ll make it public once it’s done.  We’re about 99% done with it.  We’re real close.  Some of these other style guides, that list of 20, are much more polished and fancy pants than ours is.

Shrink it down, yes.  It might come down to what you’re talking about with -

Female:  It sounds like you don’t put in the editorial.

Jesse Racine:  We have our editorial stuff that much.

Female:  That should be very important.

Jesse Racine:  Yes, not going to cut it for your users.  Sure.

Female:  I hear a serial comment.

Jesse Racine:  Yes.  Anyone else?  If that’s it then thanks for coming to my presentation.  I hope you got something useful.

[Applause]

Announcer: For more presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference visit HighEdWeb.org/2008 or sign up for our podcast and feed at HighEdWeb.org/podcast.xml

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