Website Best Practices

Writing for the Web

Use as few words as possible to provide the information needed.
Use heading styles to organize content. H1 is for the page title only. SEO scores are reduced if more than one H1 style is found on the page.
Keep the Heading styles in hierarchical order, don’t skip a number.
Use Bullets when possible. This makes the content easily scannable.
Link text should describe the content being linked; avoid ‘read more’ or ‘download file’.
If you are adding a link to another page on your website, use Relative URLs and not Absolute URLs. (Relative links begin after the domain, good: /membership and bad https://domain.org/membership)
Use Bold to bring focus to key words.
Info-graphics are an excellent way to convey information.

Navigation titles should be clear and concise; do not make the user ‘think’.
Keep the navigation structure simple. Too many choices can be overwhelming.
Navigation titles should be unique. If there are two similar titles, how will users discern what to expect at the different pages? If the content is that similar, put the content on the same page.
Navigation titles should not be acronyms or brand names (i.e. use ‘Newsletter’ instead of what you call your newsletter.) Do not repeat your organization’s acronym.
Page titles should match the navigation title. (Exception example: If the navigation is ‘Newsletter’, the page title could be ‘Newsletter: (your brand name of the newsletter)”

The words that you’d want users to type to find the content should be the TITLE of that content.
Those same words need to be worked into the summary/description/excerpt for that content. Descriptions should be 135 – 160 characters long.
Those same words need to be in the actual content, especially in the first paragraph.
Images need to be the correct size and have alt text (more on images below.)
Content needs to be relevant and accessed. This means ‘trim out pages and content that are not getting much traffic’.

Use different styles and layouts such as ‘cards’ and ‘accordions’ to create a visually appealing structure.
Stick to the styles in your style sheet. Do not highlight text and change the font, font size, or font color.
Don’t use Carousels; studies show that people do not watch those or engage.
Do not use Tables. Layout the content linearly down the page instead of in rows. This makes the content easily scannable as well as being mobile-friendly.
Paid ads should be relevant to your audience. Ads should never be at the top of the page or in a place that gets in the way of your members trying to get to your content.
Use meaningful images to break up the text on the webpage.
Use the side bar column to link to more content to keep the user engaged; avoid pages with dead-ends.
If the site must have iframes: ensure the iframes are responsive and ensure the elements have a title attribute.

Upload images of the proper size. If your images are too large (even if the design restricts their size) the page load, and your SEO score, will suffer.
Images need to have Alternative text. The only exception are design elements.
An image with a null alt attribute should not have title or other attributes.

Avoid PDF files. However, if the site must have PDF files:
Ensure the PDFs are text based, not images saved as PDFs. Otherwise the search indexer won’t be able to index the text.
Use Document Properties to add the Document title and the language attribute.
Ensure PDFs are tagged to be accessible by screen readers.
Ensure the Figures and images in PDF documents have ALT text.

Review old pages, news items, events, etc. and unpublish items that are irrelevant.

Have a schedule to review the site regularly. This could be quarterly, semi-annually, or annually.

Review the navigation

Review the categories: check for duplicates, check for categories with too few items

Review content to ensure it is being marked with the proper categories

Check for broken links