People read books, magazines and letters, but online, they graze. When crafting pieces for the College website, keep your writing spare, graphically clean, and easy to navigate.
When revising an existing Web page, update thoroughly as you go.
In sentences, use periods between the sections of a phone number. Underline and link e-mail addresses.
Contact Career Services at 978.867.4275 or firstname.lastname@example.org.
In freestanding blocks of contact information, space between the sections of a phone number. Precede each line of contact information with a capital letter (P for phone, E for email, F for fax) and a single space.
Create an active link for each email address and web address.
How to create a link >>
Contact Career Services:
P 978 867 4275
F 978 867 4647
More than one space within text can cause technical glitches in Web postings. Use only one space between sentences.
If you have trouble kicking the double space habit, use the Find/Replace function to replace double spaces with single ones.
When writing for the College website, simply hit "return" or "enter" to transition from one paragraph to the next. This "hard return" creates a blank line between paragraphs. Do not indent the first line of paragraphs. The arrangement of the text on this page is an example of the College website paragraph style.
To create a hard return, press the enter key (return key on macs).
A "soft return" creates a line break without skipping a line.
This short line and the one below were positioned with "soft returns."
To create a soft return, press shift + enter.
To align columns of text, create a table. (Do not try to align text by inserting multiple spaces.)
To create a table, click the Table button in the web editor () and follow prompts. Table settings can be modified by right-clicking within them.
a.m. and p.m. Lowercase these in website text, and use periods. Equally acceptable: small capital letters with periods, as is the style for Gordon College's print communications. (Some computers can create "small caps" in Web text and some cannot.)
Hours "on the dot" 7 p.m., not 7:00 p.m.
11:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m. 7 p.m. 7:35 p.m.
Create links using words that describe the action that will result from clicking on that link. (Avoid general language such as "click here" and "go to.") This gives the reader an incentive to click, helps the reader, and also enables Google searches to pinpoint specific Gordon material and place it much higher in a queue of search results.
Type a space and two karets after a link that stands alone. These help readers identify links onscreen, even if they can't perceive color.
Please register online by Nov. 18. Buy tickets >> Read more >>
To register online, click here.
When copying text from another program such as Microsoft Word or Outlook to a Web page, use the Paste as Plain Text button () in the web editor. (Importing text that contains formatting code can create website glitches.)
Create calendar listings for your events so that they can be promoted on Gordon's Calendar page (www.gordon.edu/calendar) as well as the homepage (per availability). When you create an event listing it will also appear in calendars of all the categories you tag the event with.
To create a calendar listing:
Don't use "all caps" words in the text of an email or in its subject line. Structure sentences to emphasize important information.
Use no exclamation marks or other "unusual symbols" in email subject lines. They can cause emails to some addresses to be kicked back as undeliverable, or diverted to spam folders.
Write brief, interesting subject lines. An in-box window may display only the beginning of the subject line, so make the first words count.
Many email tools allow you to create emails with embedded images. Keep in mind that images are usually disabled by default until the recipient chooses to display them. For that reason, if critical information appears in an image, be sure to repeat it in the body of the email too.
For more comprehensive technical instructions on using Gordon's Web Editor, see the Website Editor Guide (pdf).