Pocket Guide

A few best practices to keep your site on track.

For use after you've reviewed all of the topics covered in the Writing & Style Guide, we offer the following as an everyday quick reference guide.

Craft Quality Web Content

• Keep it simple. Use short words, sentences and paragraphs.
• Use a more conversational tone. Administrative speak can be difficult to digest online.
• Don't use poor-quality or oversized images. Edit your images offline before you upload them to Cascade.
• Organize what you're saying. Write to keep important info near the top.
• Provide links within your content to help users find additional info.
• Avoid web clichés. Don't use terms like "click here," "welcome to our page," or "in the menu to your left."
• Provide good alt text and ensure documents are accessible to those using assistive technologies — or better yet, move the content from your document to a webpage.
• Content should never rely on color, size, shape, position, sound, or other sensory characteristics to convey meaning (i.e., click the red button).

Arrange Your Content for Usability

• Give every page a title. Teasers are a great way to elaborate on the page's purpose.
• Left-align your text.
• Don't overuse bold and italics.
• Break content up into skimmable sections. Bullets and headings give the eyes something to rest on.
• Use Heading 2 and Heading 3 to organize your content.
• Don't paste content directly from sources containing external formatting, including Word.
• Don't incorporate non-Cascade web elements (external widgets, animated images, etc.).
• Keep the right-hand column clean and shorter than the content area. Don't overwhelm the page.

Keeping Menus, Links & Other Navigation Usable

• Keep your menu to 8 items or fewer (larger menus may require more items).
• Ensure menu links take you to a page with the same (or very similar) page title.
• Turn on parents and siblings in menus unless doing so duplicates your site's banner title.
• Use descriptive phrases for your content links — don't use "click here."
• Indicate when linking to a document: a sample (pdf) and a sample (doc). Whenever possible, convert documents to PDFs — or better yet, move the content to a webpage for improved accessibility.