DGs and executive agencies have similarities in the topics covered on their websites: news, events, surveys, or policy are common items to many websites.

These topics are types of content. This section aims at listing the rules (following "must" in the text) and the recommendations (following "should" in the text) that DGs and executive agencies have to comply in order to create high quality websites. Following the types of content rules and recommendations helps:

• better understand users’ needs
• structure a same type of content consistently across the European Commission
• prepare the relevant type of content for efficient dissemination:
  • easily found–by users and machine-readers such as search engines
  • widely published, where relevant - available in suitable formats for content aggregators, syndicators, multipliers and end users. 

Content types

The Commission’s web experience uses templates (content types) to:

• structure content in a consistent way
• make sure the necessary metadata and content elements are there
• help content producers in their work:
• information is portable across formats, for users to consume in a way that works for them
• content types offered at platform level help avoid costs that would be incurred if DGs developed their own content types, as well as the associated duplication and maintenance costs

However, content types will not be available for all items of a website nor on all platforms (CMS). It is still strongly recommended to display content in a consistent way as described in this section when the content type is not available. When there is one for a specific type of content, we will refer to it in this section.  

• News
• Event
• Audiovisual
• Publications