Let’s say you’ve begun the journey of introducing your brand-new LearnWise AI assistant into your institution’s digital learning ecosystem. Hooray! Now the fun part begins: training your assistant to be prepared to answer any and all questions students and educators will ask now and in the future.
To be able to help your students and fellow educators, your AI assistant needs to know everything there is to know about your institution’s knowledge base, multiple tools, and resources, which are all often structured in complex ways. This makes finding the right information manually challenging.
Here’s where creating readable, well-structured website content comes in: it is essential for training your LearnWise AI Assistant properly and successfully integrating our tool into your ecosystem.
Below, we share best practices for web content and walk you through them, ensuring that your AI assistant can retrieve more relevant sources, respond more accurately, and provide useful user support.
Make sure information is structured and signposted
Website readability significantly improves when you ensure the information is well-structured and signposted. This includes typical website structure you’d see anywhere else, but if you’re not familiar with it just yet, here’s a checklist:
- Make sure to use headings consistently (h1, h2, h3, and so on).
- Clearly label sections and subsections, of each wider topic and sub-topic covered on the page.
- Use bulleted or numbered lists when discussing multiple points or steps in a process.
Make sure website pages link to each other
Every time a website is added to your LearnWise AI Assistant, a handy tool called a web content scraper goes through the site by following all hyperlinks on the starting web page (usually your site’s homepage) and then clicking on all existing links on those pages.
The web content scraper repeats this process for as long as new pages are found, ensuring it receives all information available. To ensure all pages are included at this stage, they must be referenced, either directly or indirectly, from the starting page. Orphan pages (website pages that are not linked to any other page or section of your site) are typically excluded from web scrapes.
Build for accessibility
How the web content scraper scans and extracts content from a webpage is quite similar to how a human website visitor navigates and interprets the page.
Therefore, a useful rule of thumb is: “Anything that helps a human interact with a website will help the web scraper too”. In other words, a website that is built with accessibility in mind makes for a more effective web scrape.
We recommend following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to optimize for accessibility. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Add a “skip to main content” button (WCAG 2.1 – Bypass Blocks)
- Ensure the context for hyperlinks is clear from the link text (WCAG 2.1 – Link Purpose)
Make sure tables are properly formatted
Tables are frequently used to organize key information including contact details or addresses. Tables should be properly formatted to allow values to be properly grouped and interpreted. This includes:
- Each property has a dedicated column with a clear and descriptive heading
- Each set of values is separated into a single row
- Where possible, provide additional context for each table row
Don’t ❌
Finance IT Library | +123456789 +123456789 +123456789 |
Do ✅:
Department | Phone number | Description | |
Finance | +123456789 | Contact the Finance department for any questions related to tuition payments and financial aid. | |
IT | +123456789 | Contact the IT help desk for any questions related to the VLE, wifi, and online exams. | |
Library | +123456789 | For all questions regarding the library catalog, facilities, and loan policies, contact the library team. |
Setting up LearnWise AI for success
To make sure you get the most out of your new, powerful, and personalized AI Assistant, you need to feed it the right information. We hope this article helps you get a good feel of how to structure websites for maximum compatibility with LearnWise AI.
These best practices are also helpful for your website’s readability, SEO (searchability), and general accessibility. With these pointers, giving your AI assistant the wealth of information your institution offers will pave the way for supporting students and educators quicker, better, and more seamlessly than ever before.
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