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General Guidelines

In general, content should be clean and well-formatted, using the tools available in the theme where possible. Follow these guidelines to help ensure that.

Adding new content

When adding new content, take care to paste in clean, unformatted content. You may choose to do this in one of several ways:

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

Doing this ensures you do not pick up any unintended styles from programs such as Microsoft Word, which will automatically copy styles from the program, resulting in unintended (and hard to predict) 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.
  • Hand-styling content beyond bold or italics (text color, text alignment, underlining. making a table for display purposes, etc) should be avoided where possible. 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 words or a sentence containing the words out of the original paragraph to stand on its own. Put it right next to 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 or not 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 trying subheadings, using collapsible sections, or using the shortcodes provided in this theme to make sure there is not an alternate way to achieve the same goal. By using the items provided in the theme, you ensure your content is mobile-friendly and easily accessible to all of your audience.
    • 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 like this which you add on both mobile and desktop, and file a ticket with IS&T if you run into trouble.