Every website has a unique role, purpose and audience. So, in addition to enforcing best-in-class practices (e.g., quick page loads, consistent file formats), your policies should also be created with your website’s singular role, purpose and audience in mind.

There are three different categories of policies:

• Content Policies relate to page content, such as title, URL, page text, meta tags, link text, page level, etc.

• Documents Policies relate to document types, location, size, age, and referring pages

• Media Policies relate to media files, such as file type, location, size, age, and referring pages

Once in place, these policies enable you to:

• Flag sensitive or outdated content for review (e.g., content over six years old should be refreshed)

• Enforce style guides, branding consistency, and trademarks (e.g., updated regulations for an agency service, uniform phone number formatting)

• Make mass updates easier (e.g., if someone leaves your organization and you need to scrub their name from your site)

• Catching commonly misspelled words (e.g., complement vs. compliment, does vs. dose, suck vs. such)