Content standards

What content standards are

Content standards are a written bar. They state, in a page or two, what a piece has to do before it is allowed out: what it must answer, what it must contain, how it must be structured, and what makes it fail. A writer can apply them to their own draft in ten minutes and know the answer without asking anyone.

The point is that the bar survives a busy week. Quality in a small business is usually a matter of who was tired on Thursday. A standard turns that into a pass or a fail that anybody can apply, including the person who wrote the draft.

They are most often confused with editorial guidelines, which decide whether a subject is yours to write about and what you may claim. Guidelines come first and settle whether the piece may exist. Standards come second and settle whether this draft of it is finished. They are also not the approval workflow: standards are what a reviewer checks against, and the workflow is who checks, in what order, by when.

When you need one

Three situations. The quality of what you publish visibly depends on who was free that week. You are the bottleneck because you are the only person who can tell whether something is ready, and you cannot explain why. Or you are about to hand writing to a freelancer and have no way to say what you expect that does not sound like taste.

If you publish four things a year and write all of them, this is more machinery than the job needs. A style guide settles the mechanics, and that is usually the whole of the problem.

What goes in it

• The universal bar. Seven to ten items that apply to everything: it answers a real buyer question, the answer appears near the top, it says who it is for, it is accurate today, it has one clear next step, and it has been read on a phone.
• The bar by format. A short extra list for each type you publish — service page, article, product description, email, case study — because a service page fails for reasons an article does not.
• The evidence rule. What a statement of fact needs attached to it: a figure, a date, a source, or a rewrite into something you can stand behind.
• The accessibility minimum. Headings in order, descriptive link text, alt text written by someone who saw the image, and a reading level that matches your buyer.
• What failure means. The three outcomes — fix it, hold it, drop it — and who decides which, so a failed draft does not simply sit there.

What you get

The standards page. One page, or two at the most. If it runs longer than that it will not be used, and a standard nobody applies is worse than none, because it gives everyone something to point at.

The format checklists. One short list per content type you actually publish, written so a tick or a cross is the only possible answer to each line.

Worked pass and fail examples. Four of your own recent pieces run through the bar, two passing and two not, with the failing lines marked and the fix named. Writers calibrate against examples far faster than against rules.

A one-hour session. On video, with your writers marking a fresh draft together, so the first disagreement about the bar happens with me in the room rather than after I have gone.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Thunder Bay retailer selling outdoor and camping equipment publishes roughly six blog posts a month plus product descriptions, using two freelancers and the shop manager. Everything goes past the owner, who approves most of it at eleven at night and rewrites about one piece in four, mostly for the same reasons each time.

Reading thirty recent pieces turns those reasons into eight lines. The commonest failure is that the answer sits in the fifth paragraph. The second is a recommendation with no stated reason, so the reader cannot tell whether it suits them. The third is a product description that never says what the item is for. Those three become the first three lines of the bar. The freelancers now mark their own drafts before sending, the shop manager approves the product descriptions outright, and the owner reads only the pieces marked as failing a line. The document is two pages and four checklists.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you publish, who writes it, and what you keep sending back. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before the work starts, set by how many content types need a checklist.
3. Reading. Twenty to forty recent pieces, sorted into what you kept as written and what you rewrote, because the rewrites are where the real standard is hiding. Three to four working days.
4. The draft bar. The universal list comes to you on its own, so we argue about the eight lines before anything is built around them.
5. The checklists and the session. Delivered with the worked examples and the hour with your writers. Two to three weeks from the first call.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call and fixed in writing before anything starts, because the work depends on how much you publish and how many formats need their own list. It does not change afterwards without your agreement. The pricing page sets out the four ways of working so you can see roughly where this sits.

What happens next

A bar is only useful if something applies it. Most people follow this with a named sign-off path so each piece is checked by somebody other than its writer, or with a final check before publishing if they would rather that job left the building entirely. Others point the bar backwards and run a full audit to see which live pages would fail it today. None of that is assumed. The standards work from the day they are agreed, on their own.