News in Your Area Guidelines For My ACS site area September 2011

Why Guidelines? Following these guidelines will provide an consistent look and feel to the cancer.org visitor creating a better user experience. Post launch of the newly designed My ACS site area, we noticed the way the current teasers and titles are being pulled, if it is lengthy, the long columns push the other content further down the page, and the inconsistent lengths are not very “pretty”.

My ACS- News In Your Area  The new presentation in My ACS shows three local articles in 3 columns.  Each article in the column can show a photo, the title and a teaser for the article.  A “More News in … “ link appears based on how the article was tagged. So if it is tagged as a Programs and Services article (localPrograms in your metadata), the link will say More News in Programs and Services…

Result from ACS Relaunch Columns too long and not visually appealing

Result from My ACS Re-launch Teaser text for each item is dynamically pulled from the Description Abstract field in the Metadata for the article. At the launch of My ACS, whatever was there is being pulled. In this new format some results do not look very good if the title is long or the teaser is long.

Example of How it Should Look

Another Example of How it Should Look

Use these Guidelines to Help  You may need to play with your three stories to get your module to look nice, as the column will show differently based on the length of the title and whether there is a photo or not.  Limit the title about 60 characters.  Limit the teaser text to about 140 characters if no image, 105 if article has image.  Have at least 3 articles, so that there are no blank columns

Where is the Teaser coming from?  The teaser is pulled from the Description Abstract field in the Metadata for the page if your News area is set up as a dynamic list  If your News articles are set up as a static list, then you have the option to override the Description Abstract field. If you leave the teaser override field blank, the teaser will be pulled from the Description Abstract field

Cleaning Up - post My ACS Launch  For current articles that need to be cleaned up, go to the contrib editor. Find the article and click on the editor button. Choose the Metadata tab at the top.  In the Description Abstract field, edit your text here to something shorter, as guidelines suggest.  Also, if your title is really long, you should change your tile in the Title field to something shorter.

New Articles  As you create new your articles, keep in mind the guidelines for your title and your teaser text. Ideally, when you publish a new item, or add it to your static list, be sure to go to cancer.org and notice how the three articles look together. If possible, make any adjustments necessary so that they look nice.

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