Goal
- Enable the immediate identification of advertisements and sponsored content.
- Avoid confusion between editorial and advertising content.
- Prevent the risks associated with conflicts of interest.
Implementation
- Highlight advertisements with a note which allows them to be identified (advertisement, advert, partners, sponsored post, etc.)
- And, as much as possible, graphically separate the advertisement from the rest of the content.
Control
In the website being checked:
- Identify advertising content.
- Check that all of the areas allocated to advertising are different from the rest of the content and include a statement allowing them to be unambiguously identified: typically, the phrase “advertising” displayed above or below the content in question.
Overview and background
The 240 Opquast rules are defined and agreed upon by an extensive community of web professionals and academics. These web quality assurance guidance rules started as a list of best practices 20 years ago. They have since been revised every five years and have been tried and tested via millions of web interactions by Opquast community’s customers, including the leading CMS communities which have developed plugins for WordPress, Drupal and Prestashop. The most recent version, v4, was established in 2020.
Each rule has individual technical sheets and the rules can be searched by project phase or various topics: e-commerce, data-privacy, internationalization, security, code, etc, or by themes: accessibility, SEO, mobile, privacy, and ecodesign. The complete checklist is available on a creative commons license BY-SA.
To learn more about the Opquast approach, read this article published at Smashing Magazine
Broad application and benefits
The rules should be applied to your projects from the design phase through to post-implementation , and they should be understood by all professionals with web and customer experience (CX) responsibilities: from strategy to operations, marketers to project managers, and editorial to technical staff. The benefits of using this ruleset are numerous, including improving customer satisfaction, web performance, and e-commerce, and expanding your client base, while also decreasing your errors and costs.
Discover Opquast training and certification
The objective of these rules and the Opquast community mission is ‘making the web better’ for your customers and for everyone! Opquast rules cover the key major areas of risk that can negatively affect website users such as privacy, ecodesign, accessibility and security.
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