Chapter 6: EDITORIAL
Intro
- Links are not a substitute for content.
Organizing your prose
- Use page and section heads to describe the material
- Include important items in the beginning
- Don't dumb down your content
- Use appropriate chunking
Online Style
- concise and factual
- avoid being vague and verbose
- Other stylistic considerations
- Be frugal
- Stick to the point
- Cultivate a voice - fine line between engaging and annoying
- Think globally - dates: 12 Mar 1996
Titles and subtitles
- Text styles
- Headline styles: Bold, capitalize initial letters of words
- Document titles
- References to other websites
- Titles of documents mentioned in the text
- Proper names, product names, trade names
- Down Style: Bold, capitalize first word only
- Subheads
- References to other sections within the site
- Figure titles
- Lists
- Page titles should
- Incorporate the name of the company, organization, or Web site
- Form a concise, plainly worded reminder of the page contents
- Text formatting for web documents
- Excessive markup
- Link colors
- Use the best tool - word processors with spell check
- Style sheets in word processors
- Special characters
- No auto hyphens
Links
- navigational
- hypertext
- disrupts the flow of content in your site
- radically alters the context of information
- should reinforce, not distract
- links should direct within your website
- Maintain context
- Keep navigation tools the same on each page
- Open link in new window
- Place links to related sites at bottom of page
- Avoid "click here..."
