Content Organization
Think from the Visitor's Point of View
Identify your audience. If your content is specific to a particular audience, identify that audience as quickly as possible in your text. This attracts the audience you want and steers others to the content they seek.
Group related information on the same page or group of pages.
Enable visitors to scan your content. Use subheads or bold introductory text. When measuring a website's usability, these factors are highly influential:
- Headings
- Bold text
- Highlighted text
- Bulleted lists
- Captions
- Topic sentences
Characteristics of Well-Organized Content
- Content is organized logically, based on users' needs, not the organization's.
- Bulleted lists are used for non-procedural lists; ordered or numbered lists for procedural tasks.
- Users are not forced to scroll vertically to discern the content's organization.
- Intra-page links (anchors) are not used as they diminish the impact of information.
- Organization-centric information (about us) is separated from task-oriented information (how to).
- "Contact Us" information is maintained in a single central location for the organization and is linked from relevant places.
- Content is grouped by type (Examples: task-oriented, reference, explanatory).
- Content that is most-often used and most important is kept or linked near the top of the hierarchy tree.
Section Headers
Headings should indicate the content of the text to follow. They should not be mysterious or overly wordy. Do not include links within headers.Page content should be organized with the use of "Heading" font styles applied to the section headers in descending order, beginning with "Heading 2 <H2>".
The title of the page (which is entered at the top of the "Edit" screen) will be displayed with the "Heading 1 <H1>" font style. This will happen automatically, and does not need to be selected. The "Heading 1 <H1>" style should not be used anywhere else in the page. This will ensure that all browsers (including those for the visually impaired) will correctly interpret the content of the page, and will also properly order information for search engine optimization.
The correct use of section headers will help our website have a consistent look and feel, and will aid our users in quickly and easily parsing the content of each page.
Do Not Indent Text
Text should not be indented unless it is a block of quoted text or a bulleted or numbered list.
Our website has a relatively narrow width already, so using indentation to organize the page content quickly makes for extremely narrow columns. Section headers should be used to separate different blocks of material. If your page looks too long, consider editing the content or splitting the document into several connected web pages.
Last updated on Tuesday, January 23, 2007.
