Web Guidelines
Use Headers
Effective headers make the text more visually scannable, which makes it easier for users to find the information they are looking for. In large documents, easily-scannable text is critical.
In the “Style” menu, at the bottom of the list is a series of choices labeled “Heading 1”, “Heading 2” … “Heading 6”.
- The page title should be “Heading 3”
- Any section titles within the page should be “Heading 4”
- Any subsection titles underneath should be “Heading 5”
Heading 1 should never be used.
Bold & Italics
The style menu includes “Bold” and “Italic” styles. Please use these sparingly for emphasis. Bold and italic styling should be used to provide impact or attract attention to a word or phrase, to make it stand out from the surrounding text. Avoid using Bold & Italics for section headlines (use Header 4 or Header 5 -- see above). To call attention to an entire block of text, instead of using bold, place a meaningful header above it and format the text normally.
Contextual Links
When creating links in your document, try to make the links intuitively blended into the sentence rather than explicitly labeling them. For example:
Ideal: “Please refer to our advising forms for more information.”
Avoid: “Click here for our advising forms.”
Appropriate Document Types
When including a document attachment, there are a number of formats that can be used (.doc, .pdf, .ppt, etc.). To keep our content viewable by the largest number of people, we should try to avoid using proprietary formats, or at least offer non-proprietary alternatives where possible. In order of preference (highest to lowest)
For Documents:
- Acrobat (.pdf)
- Text (.txt) or Rich Text Format (.rtf)
- Word (.doc) / Excel (.xls) (Office 2003 or earlier)
- Word (.docx) / Excel (.xlsx) (Office 2007)
- Publisher (.pub)
- Powerpoint (.ppt / .pptx) – [Contact us if you are wanting to put up a slideshow]
For Images *
- JPEG (.jpg) / GIF (.gif)
- PNG (.png) / SVG (.svg)
- Acrobat (.pdf)
- Publisher (.pub) / Photoshop Document (.psd) / AutoCad (.dwg)
- Embedded in a Word Document (.doc)
* Images should always 72 dpi, RGB format, preferably no wider / taller than 400 pixels)
Use Lists where appropriate
The list feature (to the right of the style menu) should be used whenever you have a series of related items. If list items are consistently long enough (over a sentence long each) you may want to consider just writing them out as paragraphs instead.
Be Concise
Keep all content clear, focused, and direct.
