General Guidelines

In general, content should be clean, well-formatted, and easy to scan, using the tools available in the theme. This will help site visitors find information and achieve their goals (and keep them coming back).

These guidelines will help you craft great content.

Writing for the web

People read online and print content differently. Most visitors to your site are scanning the page quickly for information relevant to some question they have or action they wish to take. Here are some tips for drafting content in a way that helps users to achieve their goals:

  • Chunk your content. Break content into manageable chunks, making it easier for users to scan. An unbroken block of text looks daunting (or potentially tedious) to your user. Rather than tackling a lengthy passage, they may skip it.
  • Use clear headlines and subheads. You’ve broken your content into chunks; now provide the user with a map through those chunks with headings and subheadings.
  • Use bullets and numbered lists. Rather than asking users to sift through a long paragraph for the information they want, simplify their task by placing information in structured lists. Review your content and see where you might be able to break it down into lists of items. Don’t worry if some lists are short—a sentence and two bullets is easier to scan than three sentences.
  • Use short sentences and paragraphs. The standard is no more than 20 words per sentence and five sentences per paragraph. Use dashes instead of semicolons. Better yet, break the sentence in two. It’s okay to start a sentence with “and,” “but,” or “or” if it makes things clear and brief.
  • Talk like your users. Every organization has acronyms, terms of art, initialisms, etc. Your users, however, may not know these terms. For example, as space permits, use “Contact the School of Hospitality” rather than “Contact SHA.”
  • Use descriptive text links. Don’t create links that use phrases such as “click here.” Write the sentence as you normally would and place the link on the word or words that best describe what you’re linking to (note, for example, how the words “create links” in the previous sentence link to information about how to create HTML links).
  • Ensure that each page makes sense on its own. Remember, plenty of site visitors may use Google (or another search engine) to find information about your organization. That means they can enter a site from any page. For this reason, create content that’s not dependent on other pages or sections of your site. A page requiring a lot of context to parse, or one that is nested deep in your site, may benefit from related links that guide the user to background or explanatory information.

Resources for crafting user-friendly text

For more tips on writing for the web, see Usability.gov’s Writing for the Web or the guide drafted by New York University.

Ginny Redish’s book Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Contents That Work is a great resource for making content scannable for screens (and is available online via the BU Libraries).

For a more general introductory text about web usability that also includes a chapter on writing for the web, we recommend Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.

Adding new content

When adding new content, take care to paste in clean, unformatted content. You can do this any number of ways:

  • Use the “Paste as text” button in the WordPress visual editor (second row of icons).
  • Paste your text into the text tab in the WordPress editor.
  • Paste your text in a plain text editor such as Notepad first, and then paste it in either the visual or text editor tabs in WordPress.
  • Paste your text in the visual editor, highlighting all, and hit the “Clear Formatting” button.

Adding text using one of the above methods ensures that you don’t pick up any unintended styles from programs such as Microsoft Word, which automatically copies styles from the program, often resulting in unintended (and unpredictable) behavior in the design.

Content formatting

Content should be formatted according to web standards, using semantic HTML. Please note the following as you style your page content:

  • The <h1> tag is reserved for the page title. Use <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, or <h5> for your subtitles within content. You can do this by selecting “Heading 2” (or the heading level you’d like) underneath the Paragraph dropdown in the WordPress editor. Formatting your heading tags correctly is critical for accessibility and screen readers to properly parse your page so that everyone can read it.
  • The <blockquote> tag is reserved for quotes. To style or indent, use one of the available shortcodes. If nothing fits your needs, you may use a simple indent.
  • Styling content by hand beyond bold or italics (text color, text alignment, underlining, making a table for display purposes, etc.) should be avoided. Check if any of the following situations apply before doing so:
    • You need a headline for a paragraph of content.
      • Do this instead: Use the appropriate <h> tag as described above.
    • You need a sentence or some words to be very, very obvious.
      • Do this instead: Bold or italicize the word. If more is needed, pull the language out of the original paragraph to stand on its own. Put it directly beside the appropriate call to action.
    • You need something to have a special style, like a callout.
      • Do this instead: Use the callout or highlight shortcodes to draw attention to the item.
    • You want to have a special layout with items in a grid or next to each other, so you use a table.
      • Do this instead: Think carefully about whether the data is related to each other by rows and columns. If not, and you’re using the table just to get things to look a certain way, consider employing subheadings, collapsible sections, or the shortcodes provided in this theme to ensure there’s not another way to achieve the same end. By using the tools provided with the theme, you ensure your content is mobile-friendly and easily accessible for all audiences.
    • You want to separate two sections of content.
      • Do this instead: Use the horizontal line element in the WordPress editor to separate sections of content.

Using custom HTML in the text section of the WordPress editor

You may use custom HTML whenever you see the Text tab of the WordPress editor. Please note that using custom HTML outside of the tools provided to you in the theme may cause unexpected results. Be sure to test any items you add on both mobile and desktop by going to the Customizer and clicking the mobile, tablet, and desktop icons in the lower right-hand corner of the Customizer menu. If you run into trouble, just file a ticket with IS&T.