Style tips for aggregated sites
These tips are for guidance only since we are not in the business of telling other people how to run their websites but the better your link looks on our site then the more likely it is that people will visit your site.
What we do
ODHQ displays a small extract of aggregated content from other websites which provide RSS feeds.
Generally we do not accept nor publish press releases nor reproduce advertorials. If you want information about your organisation to appear on ODHQ you must first publish it on your own website or blog and provide an RSS feed, only then can we consider it for inclusion on ODHQ.
Text
Take particular care with what you write in your headline and introduction – no bad language please.
Try to avoid the use of SHOUTING HEADLINES ie the use of upper case characters. It looks bad and is not normal practice on professional sites.
Keep your headlines short and to the point.
Try and write a concise introductory paragraph to your blog post which sets out clearly what you are about to say.
Try to avoid including a long URL (hyperlink) in the introductory text of your blog since this can interfere with formatting.
Generally, if you see formatting problems with your text on our site then please try to experiment with the way in which you construct your RSS feed.
RSS feeds
If your site is mainly about other issues, and you only occasionally blog about organisation design issues, consider offering an OD specific RSS feed which can be created by using tags or categories on your blog. This will make it easier for us to guide readers to relevant content on your website.
Pictures
Do not be cautious about including your pictures in your RSS feed since we will only automatically generate a small thumbnail of the first image included in your RSS feed. If no picture is present in your feed we will usually reproduce a stock thumbnail of you or your site’s logo.
A picture at the start of a blog can sometimes lead to formatting problems. Ideally, if you wish to place a picture at the top of your blog then please include it after your headline and after the introductory paragraph. If a picture gets placed before the headline and introduction text, then it may be your picture’s caption that appears on our website instead of your introduction.
Watch out for third party plug-ins on your site which automatically place images at the top of your RSS posts such as smiley face ‘like’ images or social media referral images. These tiny images may automatically appear if they are the first or only image our system sees.
Timing
If you have several items ready to post then try to avoid publishing them all at once. Space posts out over a period of time so that your blog or website can maintain maximum exposure.
Credits
We make sure that we credit you and so we would be grateful if you could reciprocate. If you benefit by getting traffic from our site then please give us a link on your blog, or mention us from time to time. Those links will be indexed on search engines and just as our mention of you will help you rise up the search rankings, you mentioning us will too, and so more people will ultimately see your site.
Legal issues
We claim no copyright over any of your textual or image content that is aggregated on our site. It is up to you as a publisher to work within the copyright and defamation laws when producing your site. We do not manually monitor all the feeds all of the time. If you find you have made an error and you either correct your post or remove it altogether, it may take up to an hour for that change to be automatically reflected on our site. If an error remains on our site for longer than an hour, you can bring it to our attention by contacting us here for it to be manually removed. If you have reason to publish an apology then please ensure that you attribute the same keywords and include it in your RSS feed so that the apology is automatically aggregated and our readers are informed. Aggregated content is not stored on our site when it drops off the aggregated list – or when it is manually removed.
These style tips should be read alongside our terms here.
Contact
If you have a website or blog which you would like to be considered for inclusion or exclusion on our aggregation list then please contact us here.
We are not obliged to give specific reasons as to why a website or blog request for inclusion may be declined or subsequently withdraw.
You can read more about us here.