Here are a few tips to help you keep your content layout clean, attractive and easy to read.
- Avoid underlining text that isn’t a link – Only links should be underlined.
- Format links appropriately – Links to external websites should be set to ‘open in a new window’ to prevent your visitor from leaving your site. Links to internal pages should be set to ‘open in the same window’ so that the site visitor doesn’t end up with many open windows for the same site.
- Avoid unnecessary bolding or italicizing – Bolding of text on a page can help to draw attention to a statement, but should be reserved for titles, or occasional emphasis. Repeated use of this diminishes the impact and cake make a page look cluttered or sloppy.
- Keep alt text relevant – the Alt text on images should reflect what the image is displaying. It’s meant as a text equivalent for what the image shows, for programs (like Google robots) and people (like blind using screen-readers) who can’t actually see what the image is.
- Avoid overuse of Header styles – Try to keep headers used more for titles of sections and less for emphasis on certain sentences – as with the bolding, overuse will diminish the effect. Do not use heading styles on text that normally belongs in a paragraph or quote. If you want to draw attention to some text, simply bold or italicize it, within reason.
- Do not use text characters (such as space, dash, underscore) for formatting – It may seem like a good idea to add spaces, dashes, etc to add design styling, but these will be formatted differently in different browsers and will not look as you intended!
- Do not copy and paste directly from a Microsoft Word document – Doing so will bring over proprietary formatting which will cause your web page to appear differently in non-Microsoft browsers and computers. Instead, use the “Paste as Plain Text” function in the editor.
- Resize images properly – Resizing image should ideally be done within the image editor by hitting the edit button, not by clicking-and-dragging within the Editor window. Resizing images within the Editor space using the handles only resizes the visible dimensions. So it will take a long time to download a small looking image. Also, the image will often become distorted from this.
Instead, you can resize the image before you upload it to the site (try using a program such as Adobe Photoshop, or try free online editors such as free online image editors such as http://pixenate.com/ or http://www.fotor.com/), or use the “Edit” button in the image management window to change to a smaller thumbnail view of the image.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us!