TwilightBlog Guidelines

TwilightBlog Guidelines

Here are a quick, hopefully, set of guidelines to make your posting easier here at TwilightBlog. The guidelines are not meant to restrict, but to help keep TwilighBlog uniform and clean while also presenting our audience with information of interest. You are REQUIRED & MUST read our guidelines and the quick links section. I suggest you print out this guidelines post and keep it with you for a few days until it becomes routine. These guidelines are not hard, and some of them are for copyright and legal reasons, they MUST BE DONE!

1) Titles: Be creative with your titles while also incorporating what the post is about (creativity with the titles will be limited, we recognize, so just do with it what you can!). Also, do not make them really long, just be precise! Also, avoid using "video" and "picture" in your title. You can always still say "Robert Pattinson on Ellen" or "Ashley Greene At Charity Event" without having to say "Video of Robert Pattinson on Ellen" or "Pictures of Ashley Greene at Charity Event." Long title take too long to read and generally wont accurately describe the post so if under "Edit Posts" your title is cut off by "..." then it is TOO LONG!

2) Tags/Labels: DO NOT create new tags. Tags help our readers find more material and so I (Tara) have created specific tags (and continually work on them) that will best present more posts and categorize material for our readers. Click on "Edit Posts" to see all the tags listed on the left hand side to get familiar with that tags we tend to use! Generally most posts have 2-4 tags. You cannot not tag a post! We will know when you have created a new tag, Tara has them memorized!

3) Pictures: please use the newest pictures available, not ones several years old. Don't forget to insert a title into the Alt tags (alt=""). Access this by selecting the "Edit HTML" tab (as opposed to Compose). For more information on filling out the alt tags, click here.

Also, check your post after it's on the site to ensure that the size of the picture doesn't overflow into the sidebar and that the text flows smoothly around it. Make sure you if you are posting a "gallery" of pictures that you have 3-4 pictures (this keeps people on our site as much as possible instead of just giving them the url to see the rest of the photographs after only one picture) and that they are 400-500 px wide (when pictures are small our viewers cannot see them properly). In other words the picture(s) should look like this:

4) Quality: Quality is of great importance! Make your news, video, or information entertaining and well written for the audience. Your can ALWAYS write a paragraph no matter the subject. This includes your own personality, don't leave that out!

5) Questions: If you are unsure of anything, just save your work as a draft and then get help via the blog's board from Daryl or Tara. Your question may be useful to all, so don't be shy! If you have a question simply post a new post here on the board and ask away. Daryl or Tara will get to you as soon as we see it and comment back with an answer!

6) Gossip: This is a touchy subject and hard to deal with as things done in public, are well, public. For the most part at TwilightBlog we do not like to speculate when there really is not any evidence and they are just rumors. However, if there is a picture that makes something obvious, that is fine. We just ask that you point out both sides of the "argument" for the picture and don't just start saying somebody did something when they may have not. Just present the evidence well and let the audience do the speculating.

7) Sources: Not everything needs a source. However, if your information is coming from an article (which is somebody else's work) then you MUST give credit. The correct way to do this is: {via SOURCE} Replace SOURCE with the source name and hyperlink to the article. This is placed at the end. You are only providing a source if you have used someone's WRITTEN work. You do not need to source photos or videos.

8) Italics: If you have written a lengthy article this may get annoying, but it is proper grammatics. Please italicize movies and TV shows. Do not use "" in a post, italicize!

9) Capitalization: In the headlines please capitalize every letter except prepositions. Also, use basic capitalization rules when writing (proper names, titles, first letter of sentence, etc.)

10) Post Length: If your post is more than 5 sentences, please try and break it into at least 2 paragraphs so that our readers eyes flow over it better. We always say that there is SOMETHING that you can write, so posts need to be at least 50 words (generally this happens with a video or single picture).

11) Videos: Please make sure the video is no wider than 500px. Also, NEVER post just a video, ensure that you include a short synopsis about the video and why it's interesting. This text should always precede the video. You must always tag/label a video!

12) Font Colors: Please do not change or alter the color of the font. This messes with how the posts look and we have it the way it needs to be. This includes when you hyperlink - so do not change the color of text or links.

13) Other Works: As our favorite Twilight actors work on other projects we LOVE to keep our fans updated on what they are doing. However, since we are a Twilight website we need to be careful on the quantity of those posts. This does not mean you do not have to slow down on posting information on their other projects but you need to simply just combine the pictures, videos, and information so the quantity of those posts appears to be less. An easy way to do this is to start a draft on "so and so's" new movie and add information until you have 2-4 items pertaining to it before posting. This gets all the same information to our views but makes it appear like we are still mainly Twilight. Ta da! "Problem" solved!

14) Grammar: Please use correct grammar, this MUST HAPPEN! Check your posts and edit them. We have actually can and do get complaints from readers about this. Take your time, this isn't a test or a race.

15) Sending Readers to Another Site: If possible, do not always give an option to go see the "rest" of something, this makes readers leave our site, however, it will have to be cited, of course!

16) Posting Copyrighted Material and Personal Information: Please be careful when posting information or pictures that belong to another source, company, or magazine. Some are very particular when it comes to their copyrighted material that has recently been published and we have had to deal with some copyright infringement issues over time with various companies. Another thing to be careful about is personal information of a fan, reader, or anyone involved in the Saga. If you have not been given permission by the actual person involved to post their Facebook page, e-mail, personal website, etc then DO NOT do it. We have received justified complaints regarding this and it should not happen.