Now that you’ve taken a shot at the first four ways I’ve proposed to improve an AboutUs page, we’re on to the fifth and final entry in the series. The good news? Now that you’ve completed the easiest parts by adding a Summary and pruning your Topics, and dove in to wiki editing by adding a description and WikiLinking, you’re on to the fun part.
Part V: Use Some Templates
For those already somewhat familiar with wiki templates, your first thought might be the huge, rambling pieces of markup at the top of Wikipedia articles that create their info boxes. Those templates translate in to vital sources of information, but often add immensely to the complexity of wiki pages.
The goal of AboutUs templates is to reduce the amount of stylistic markup in pages, adding a little flair without adding to confusion for those not old hands at WikiText and HTML.
Our own AboutUs page uses the social media link templates and the RSS feed template.
How do templates reduce complexity in practice? Well, here’s an example: if you want to add a color border and header in a wiki page, you’d traditionally have to use more than 10 lines of clunky HTML style.
With the AboutUs template to do this, all one must do is add one of the BasicBox templates with your header and body text. An even simpler set of templates are the ones we use to link to accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr etc. They are simpler to link to, and are visually tailored to each site with icons.
You can check out a full list of our templates here and learn more about using the WikiEditor’s template toolbox in particular here. If you’re curating a wiki of your own, feel free to borrow any templates you like for your own purposes.
That’s a wrap!
Thanks for reading our series on Five Simple Ways to Improve an AboutUs page. Hopefully, you’ve now got some new and interesting ideas for what to do with the pages you care about. For more tips about the myriad improvements you can make for readers of AboutUs and the SEO benefit our pages provide, be sure to check out the work of our WikiEditors and the SpotlightUs pages they build.
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When I read this, I thought the RSS template was going to be something which displayed the content of the feed rather than just a link. Have you considered using something like the RSS2Wiki extension?
No, I hadn’t seen that before, but it’s pretty darn nice. I would love to have that implemented on AboutUs.
Thanks for the suggestion!
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