How to create policies to uphold standards for digital content

Policies refer to any standards your organization wishes to uphold in relation to your digital content.

For example, if you want to avoid certain words in the site's text, you can create a policy that searches for, and highlights, these words if they are present.

Policies are created using the Siteimprove Policy module (see the article Introduction to Policy).

This article describes how to create a policy and includes:

• Creating a policy
• Video on how to create a Content Policy 
• Policy examples

Creating a policy

You can choose from one of four options to create a policy.

1. Quickly create simple policies with the ‘Getting Started’ wizard. We recommend this option for simple content searches. Click on Learn > Get Started. Choose what you are looking for from the drop-down menu. Enter your match and click on "Go".

2. You also have the option to create a policy using predefined policies from the Policy Library.

Note: Check out our interactive tutorial on how to add a policy from the Policy Library.

3. Duplicate an existing policy with similar rules and modify it based on your needs.

4. Create your own policy from scratch if the first three options don’t meet your needs. To create a policy manually click on My Policies > Create policy.

When you create a policy you will see that it consists of two main elements: Category and Rules.

Category: Here you select if a policy relates to general content on the site, or if it is specific to document or media files.

Rules: Once a category has been selected, you can add rules to the policy. Rules are the building blocks you can use to assure that the content of each page matches your website’s standards.

A policy can consist of one or more rules.

The "And include" option is used between multiple rules.

Within a single rule, you can add multiple "OR" matches by clicking "Add another match".

Above each rule, you can click on "include" to change it to "exclude". This can be used if you want to find pages that do not contain a match. (For example to find a specific word except on pages whose URL contains /news/.)

Video on how to Create a Content Policy

Policy examples

Example 1: Unwanted terms 

Policy: Find unwanted terms on your site

Category: Content

Rule: Content match (All unwanted terms can be added to the same rule, using "Add another match")

Results: All pages that contain one or more of the terms.

Example 2: Link text

Policy: Link texts that contain just "Read more" or "Click here"

Category: Content

Rule: Link text (all links texts can be added to the same rule)

Results: All pages that contain one or more of the link texts.

Example 3: Long page titles

Policy: No page titles over 70 characters in a specific page group

Category: Content

Rules: Page title length & Page URL

Results: All pages whose URL contains /business/ and have a page title over 70 characters long.

Get some inspiration for policies in our Policy Library

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