Content Styleguide

Essential guidelines for writers.

🏆 Goal of our content

We offer fun, accessible, and free online party and drinking games.

The goal of our texts is to inspire readers with possible games they can choose from. We also want to persuade them to actually start playing one of the games on our website.

It’s essential to create real value for our readers. This means you should cover a topic in-depth, so the reader benefits from investing time reading the page.

Try viewing content from the readers’ perspective and ask yourself, “What do I want to know in this scenario?” You’ll often find that you want to know about game rules, who to play with, and how long a game lasts.

📄 Content types

You’ll find two kinds of content on psycatgames.com:

General content

This is content about a variety of different party/drinking games, such as 10 Best Christmas Drinking Games.

Specific content

Content crafted explicitly for a specific game, such as Truth or Dare or King’s Cups.

😎 Audience

We defined two audience groups. Content should be written for either one of them, depending on the topic.

Generalist reader

Doesn’t know which types of party/drinking games there are and is looking for inspiration for something to do.

Specialist reader

Already knows the specific drinking/party game he/she wants and is looking for ways to play this game right now, either online or via their smartphone.

✍️ Writing tips

Address the reader directly: You
Short sentences
Avoid adjectives
Avoid auxiliary verbs (e.g., “you drink” instead of “you have to drink”)
Create sub-headlines (if it’s impossible, try to use enumerations)

🗣 Tone of voice

We target people who want to have fun. This means an informal, fun, open tone of voice throughout the article. Write in a direct, to-the-point voice. Our readers want to digest info quickly.

📖 Recommended reading

Check out these articles that are good examples of well written, in-depth texts:

📝 Other notes

For every topic we provide:

The article title
The header image
Relevant pages to which pages you can link from inside the article

🏗 Structure

Title

Name of the article or the specific game.

Introduction & description

Every article should start with a text block of 1-2 sentences that makes it instantly clear what value the reader will get from this article. This is very important to hook someone for further reading.

Overview

A quick overview of requirement items / group composition /…
Whatever info someone should know to play this specific game or the games we talk about in this article.

Main content

Quick and easy to read info about the game. Tips, hints, ideas, inspiration,… Anything that adds value. Try to add extra headlines or subtitles for relevant information.

Conclusion

Short recap of the entire article.

⌨️ Text Formatting

At psycatgames.com, we’re using Markdown as our primary formatting syntax.

So what does that mean? And what is Markdown?

Markdown

Markdown is a way to style text on the web. You control how your article will look on the website. Such as formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown.

In a nutshell, it’s only regular text with a few characters thrown in, like # or *.

Markdown examples

Here are a few examples:

Headers

# This is an <h1> tag
## This is an <h2> tag
###### This is an <h6> tag

Emphasis

*This text will be italic*
**This text will be bold**

Lists

- List item 1
- List item 2
- List item 3

Numbered list

1. Numbered list item 1
2. Numbered list item 2
3. Numbered list item 3

Links

[Title of the link](https://psycatgames.com)

Markdown Previewer

To make it easier to imagine how the formatted text will look on the website, we’ve built a tool to preview Markdown.

Copy and paste the following Markdown sample into our Markdown Previewer, and see how it will look:

# This is the headline
And it's very easy to do!

## Sometimes, you want numbered lists:

1. One
2. Two
3. Three

## But sometimes you want bullet points:

- Start a line with a -
- Profit!

### Hey, this is a <h3> tag
It's also easy to make some words **bold** and other words *italic*.

And don't forget about links: [link to our homepage](https://psycatgames.com)

Open Markdown Previewer

A table of content lists every major section within your articles. A reader who only wants to read a certain section, can quickly jump to the intersting section.

Have a look at this article to get an understanding of how it looks.

Another great example for when to use a table of content is a top 10 list article.

Creating a table of content is as easy as working with markdown.

First, finish your article. After you are finished, copy and paste the base template of the table of content into your markdown file:


{{< table-of-content >}}

- [Entry One](#entry-one)
- [Entry Two](#entry-two)

The modified table of content could look like this:


{{< table-of-content >}}

- [How to play](#how-to-play)
- [Funny "Truth" Questions](#funny-truth-questions)
- [Crazy "Truth" Questions](#crazy-truth-questions)
- ...

Linking

In the example above, you’re linking to a section within the article. And it’s most likely a headline:

### Funny "Truth" Questions {#funny-truth-questions}
Here are some funny "Truth" questions...

👌 Final notes

We hope you found this document helpful to get started. You may still have some questions. Either before you begin writing or even after you’ve finished an article. In that case, don’t hesitate to drop us a message!