Web Writing Crash Course: 4. Formatting

Welcome back to the Web Writing Crash Course series, where we share tips to create accessible, scannable, searchable, and overall engaging web content.

Nothing is more exhausting than staring at a plain wall of online text with no visual cue for you to reorient yourself. But with just a few formatting tricks, you can break the wall of text and make your post a more enjoyable read!

Formatting Tip #1: A picture speaks a thousand words

Images not only break up the long text but also help illustrate your point. Instead of saying “Carleton University has a beautiful campus”, why not include photos of our indeed beautiful campus?

When adding images to your post, don’t forget to add alternative text. You want to make sure that everyone in your audience can read your content, including those with screen readers.

Formatting Tip #2: Try different post elements

CMS and cuTheme have many wonderful features that allow you to say more with less. Do you want to list a series of ideas? Use a bulleted list. Comparing multiple options? Try columns. How about adding a quote? We got that covered, too!

Explore the vast range of elements you can add to your post by checking out:

• For CMS: Basic Post Elements, Advanced Post Elements
• For cuTheme: Basic Blocks, Advanced Blocks

Formatting Tip #3: Use links effectively

Visitors don’t stay on your site for long, so take advantage of hyperlinks to encourage them to explore relevant information!

When inserting hyperlinks, use descriptive words for your linked text. Web experts discourage the use of generic expressions such as “Click Here”, “View Page” or “Download PDF”, as they do not tell the readers where the links take them. Better hyperlink texts would be “View [linked page content]” or “Download [document name]”.

Formatting Tip #4: Bold only important words

Bolding words can draw the readers’ attention to important information.

However, you should only use bold where necessary. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everything you are writing is important, therefore everything needs to be bolded. Overusing bold can take the focus away from actual important information.

And that is all for this week’s tips. Stay tuned for next week’s post as we will share with you some very cool tools to measure your post’s reader-friendliness!