Website content guide & voice

Owns the how it says it layer of a new site: tone of voice and EEAT signals, captured in the per-site docs that everything downstream reads. Positioning (what you offer, for whom, the market category) is owned by website-positioning and worked out first; this guide reads it from POSITIONING.md and must stay consistent with it — it does not redefine it. A quick "does this still read clearly to a stranger" check on an already-built site is website-positioning-check, not this guide — it's a read-only diagnostic, not a voice/EEAT audit.

Outputs

• CONTENT_GUIDE.md (from the new-website skill's templates/content-guide.md) — ToV rules, EEAT checklist, page inventory with target titles, per-page-type copy templates, new-page checklist. Reads positioning/audience from POSITIONING.md.
• POSITIONING.md is owned by website-positioning; this guide consumes it and must not restate the positioning (single source of truth).
• BRAND.md is owned by website-design-system, but its positioning line comes from POSITIONING.md — keep them consistent. Each of its two parts, the palette and the logo, has its own source: what the owner brought or chose at new-website §2b (her own colours or logo, or the ones the optional website-brand-kit helped her to) stands, and is not changed here. A part she neither brought nor wanted help with keeps the starter's default until website-design-system fills it.
• STORY.md (optional, owned by website-story): when present, the home page's section order in the per-page-type copy template comes from its seven-section map. The voice rules here apply unchanged.

How to use

1. Positioning comes first: website-positioning has already produced POSITIONING.md (what you offer, for whom, the market category). Read it and build the voice on top of it. Then pull insights: run customer-research for ICP + voice-of-customer, and content-strategy if topic planning is needed. Feed the findings in.
2. Copy the template to CONTENT_GUIDE.md and fill every [BRACKET].
3. For actual page copy, hand off wording to copywriting, then apply the voice rules below and run the tone test.

Tone of voice — the hard rules (enforced by the tone test)

These mirror the tone guards proven on earlier production sites. The test is the source of truth; the guide explains the why.

• No em dashes (—). Comma, period, or colon instead.
• Active voice; proof over claims.
• Exempt: genuinely quoted customer/human voice — wrap in <blockquote>, <q>, or add data-tov-exempt. Do not use this to smuggle brand copy past the rules.

The rules below are lexical (specific words/mechanisms to avoid) and differ by language — apply the subsection that matches the site's content language.

English content

• No contractions. Long form: "cannot", "it is", "you are", "we are".
• No buzzwords: supercharge, world-class, leverage, unlock, seamless, robust, cutting-edge, empower, holistic, revolutionary, synergy, next-level (trim/extend per brand).
• Speak to the reader as "you".

German content

English's "no contractions" rule has no German equivalent — German doesn't contract "cannot" into "can't" the way English does, so there's no parallel mechanism to enforce. The real formality lever in German is register: informal "du" vs. formal "Sie" — and, more important than which one you pick, staying consistent with that choice for the entire page. Mixing "du" and "Sie" mid-page doesn't read as a stylistic choice; it reads as a translation error.

• Pick du or Sie per brand, then hold it for the whole page. This is a per-brand decision, not a universal rule — record the choice explicitly in BRAND.md/CONTENT_GUIDE.md so every page follows the same one. A community/consumer brand aiming for approachable and informal typically picks "du" throughout; a B2B/enterprise or public-sector brand more often picks "Sie" — either is fine as long as it's consistent.
• This is the German answer to "speak to the reader as 'you'" — the du/Sie choice above settles it; don't treat "you" as a separate, unresolved question for German copy. tone.spec.ts machine-checks the unambiguous mixing cases (lowercase du-family vs. capitalized "Kontaktieren Sie ..." imperatives on one page); subtler shifts still need a human read.
• No buzzwords: ganzheitlich, nahtlos, Synergie(n), Synergieeffekt(e/en), bahnbrechend, revolutionär, wegweisend, erstklassig, hochmodern, maßgeschneidert (Swiss spelling "massgeschneidert" is caught too — the enforced test doesn't fold ß↔ss, so both spellings are listed explicitly), zukunftsweisend, transformativ, unschlagbar, entfesseln/entfesselt, Spitzenreiter (trim/extend per brand).
• AI-tell phrases to avoid:
  • "In der heutigen ... Welt" (the enforced test tolerates up to two modifiers and compound Welt-nouns like "Geschäftswelt")
  • "Es ist wichtig zu betonen/beachten/erwähnen, dass..."
  • "Zusammenfassend lässt sich sagen,..."
  • "Lassen Sie uns / Lass uns / Lasst uns eintauchen / einen Blick werfen"

EEAT — build it in from the start

Search and AI answer engines reward Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust. Ship the signals, not just claims:

• Experience/Expertise: named authors with a real bio and a stable schema @id; first-hand specifics and dates; inline citations on claim-heavy copy.
• Authoritativeness: sameAs profiles that actually resolve (LinkedIn, GitHub, public register); Organization schema; corroborating external mentions.
• Trust: imprint/legal entity page, clear contact, privacy page, last-updated timestamps, HTTPS, zero broken links.

The author/Organization/sameAs plumbing lives in website-seo-geo (schema) and config.ts/SAME_AS; this skill decides what those signals should be.

Done means

CONTENT_GUIDE.md filled, voice consistent with POSITIONING.md and BRAND.md, and the tone test green after any copy change (npm test runs tone.spec.ts).