Pssst….Unlike some of my team, I don’t have perfect recollection of the character length a heading should be. So I’ll put it ‘out there’….. I have to look this stuff up just as much as anyone!
To help you/me keep track of this stuff, let me introduce a new series of short posts about our writing standards.
So fasten those seat belts – fingers on the print button, this is a quick guide to:
Headings
Included in the standards for headings are page titles and sub-headings, so I’ll cover each one here.
Page Titles
Page titles, are the first thing visitors to your site see and tell them what each page is about. They can also be seen out of context, eg in a search results page.
Your page titles need to be clear and meaningful so a user knows whether the information they want is on your page. They should:
- be short so they are easier to read – less than 50 characters (including spaces)
- use title case eg Student Life not Student life
- begin with keywords to support scan reading
- be simple and clear; jargon is difficult to understand and makes pages hard to find
Sub-headings
Sub-headings help to break up content on your page. They make text easier to scan read and help your users pick out relevant information easily. They should:
- be short and meaningful – less than 30 characters (including spaces)
- use sentence case eg Student life in Newcastle
- begin with keywords to support scan reading
Next time we’ll be covering lists.
