5 Best Practices for SharePoint News Post Content

hey guys I'm here with five best practices for News Post creation at your organization news is seen as kind of an intimidating thing you can start out with a blank canvas and get a little bit overwhelmed and a lot of people do it in many different ways we wanted to walk through five best practices to help guide your hand in making those things and help you reach a wider audience and really convey your information in a meaningful manner [Music] so the first tip is to create a SharePoint site for each news category that you have at your organization you'll be able to create news in any communication site that you create it's important to decide which sites are going to be exclusively used to create news now that's not to say you can't have other content outside of news in those sites but to break out those news categories you want to do it per site for each category so a few reasons you want to do it this way is because creating a site allows you to assign an owner to that site if you have different news owners creating different categories of news and even if you have the same owner creating news across multiple sites at the end of the day you'll be able to roll up those news and refine by those categories based on the site that they come from so in many cases it makes sense for the SharePoint site to do both of these things a safety site can manage both the safety news and be a resource for safety policies and other sorts of content related to the safety department and it's really nice that the safety owner can manage all of this content in one area so there's still a lot of users that like to manage all of their news Creation in one site you can still go about doing it that way but understand and modern the modern news roll-up web Parts filter and refine news by the site that it comes from so it's not easy to break out news based off of some sort of category that's not really on the news article or post itself it is based off of where the news comes from so you really should break them out across multiple sites thank you so another best practice is skipping over the fluff you want to add details and information that are relevant and important to your consumers that are reading this news you don't want to barricade them with walls of text and overload them with content that they're just going to glaze over and decide not to read in the end you want to give them the details of the events the times the things the people all of the content that they really care about that they came to read if they're especially if they're searching for your news article you shouldn't be afraid of white space and having a lot of padding around your content because that's kind of more of a modern look and feel but what's really important is that you have the content That Matters to them present ready to deliver to them for example I made a news article on a vaccination shot notice this might be something that happens annually at a business but really people are already aware of the things about this news article what they care about is finding what time they need to be there what days they can go to get their vaccination shot and some of the details if there's health related things that they need to be aware of or if they're eligible to get something like that so these are things people are already looking for in a frequent event like this or in a frequent News Post like this so the user that created this might have simply copied and pasted it and added a whole bunch of information relevant to HR that's not relevant to the user and the user might not even choose to read it because there's just so much content that they glaze over so you can see that the way this is formatted we pulled out all of the important information out of the body and it works way better for the user to find what they need to very quickly and it wouldn't work as well if it was buried inside and they had to go looking for the actual details in the body thank you it's another best practice if you want your users to do something with your news article use call to action so I have an example news article here for benefits registration again this is something that probably happens every year in an organization and I want to walk through this kind of ask the question what do we want people to do when they land on this News Post there's some text here that says you have a form to submit by a certain deadline there's an announcement at the top and and some of the more finer details about health versus Dental versus Optical so you can see that there's an email me button there's my profile down there so you can get in touch with me in a couple different ways and then there's a button to get into your health portal maybe that's where you have to submit that form to but these are all things that could have been hyperlinks that were buried in the text body that we decided to make the button web part or the call the action web part really take the center stage here and show the user that this is where you go to do this specific thing with this post so a lot of common scenarios about needing users to go to a certain destination open a certain document download a certain file or email somebody all all great examples of things that you can put right onto the page and have the user access them directly there while they're reading foreign is to actually store your images in SharePoint this seems like an obvious tip and kind of a given when it comes to people who have used SharePoint for a long time but we really want to explain why you should be doing this so although SharePoint allows for you to link out to external sites into other areas to bring in an image and have that connection there that image can always break or get deleted if you're not the one in charge of that file so bringing your images into SharePoint to live alongside your news articles ensures that they won't break because you own the images in that SharePoint site and that your users have sites to see those images you don't want to put your images in a different site that users may not have access to because when they land on the news article it's not going to show the image in modern SharePoint they've made it really easy to adjust focal points of images but again this is a mobile friendly environment so you want to pick images that are don't have borders that aren't filled with text that's going to get cut off because once you upload them when you look at on mobile or on a tablet as opposed to a desktop it's going to look and feel a little bit different on each of those devices and that's kind of the intent is to not have to worry about sizing or scaling your images just getting them up there so that they provide an overall theme to your news posts so I'm going to say that a second time do not put text in your images beforehand it's going to get cut off it's not accessible and there's way better ways to do it in SharePoint foreign more best practice I have is using page templates to create a consistent feel and look across all of your sites in your organization so you may already know that you can create a copy of any page or News Post in SharePoint with a click of a button that's pretty cool people like to duplicate news articles or news posts that might have the same look and feel and just tweak the content because all the content moves over into that copy we're going to take that a step further and say that you can create a page template of any of those pages also so when you create a News Post from scratch instead of getting a blank page you get something that has web parts and a title and an image already included ready to for you to fill out the rest of it so let's say I want to make a page template of this vaccination shot notice I can go in and create a new copy of it update some of the fields that I want maybe I need to remove some of the dates out there and just leave the filler so I can put new dates in I'm just going to call it page template for now okay so you can see I just published a new page and when you publish a new page you get an option to save it as a template so when you click that button now I'm landing on the actual template which is stored in a different folder in the page library but now whatever I do to this page is going to update a template from now on and that template will be an option that I have when I go to click and create a new News Post in this site so if I want to put in a title to say enter Title Here say I have some users that are going to be using this template but they don't really know what all these fields are for and I might want to add some sections here maybe each news category has a different look and feel so I want to build out some of these page layouts differently for each site but we can throw a couple web Parts in here that looks pretty good and when I click save page template button at the top here now on my site if I go back into the page Library under site Pages here you'll see that SharePoint created a new template section new templates folder for me to go back to this news template if I ever need to update it but if I click new here and go to a new News Post from the home page for example now I get this as an option to pick as a template along with those other built-in options I can go in and edit this if I need to set it as a default template and just delete it if I end up not needing it anymore one thing about these things that I don't like is you do have to create them for each individual site so page templates are independently managed within each site and they're not really easy to move around I wish there was a better way hopefully one will come along if they do I'll definitely be writing about it so those are five best practices that we want to show you guys today to help set you guys up for success in creating news posts and really communicating with your audience at your organization and we'll be writing a lot more content about this in the future so like And subscribe ring the bell down below add comments and and let us know what you guys think of this video this is Matt and I'm signing off [Music] [Music] thank you

Channel: Bulb Digital

Views: 2,416

Keywords: free sharepoint online training, free sharepoint online tutorial, how to use sharepoint, how to use sharepoint online, learn sharepoint online, microsoft sharepoint online, microsoft sharepoint tutorial, sharepoint online, sharepoint online beginner tutorial, sharepoint online free tutorial, sharepoint online training, sharepoint online tutorial, sharepoint tutorial, sharepoint tutorial for beginners, tips and tricks sharepoint online, new posts, best news post practices

Id: GS9pcl79aSk

Length: 9min 26sec (566 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 22 2023