Pocket Guide

A few best practices to keep your site on track.

For use after you've reviewed all of the topics covered in the Writing & Style Guide, we offer the following as an everyday quick reference guide.

Keep it simple. Use short words, sentences and paragraphs.
Use a more conversational tone. Administrative speak can be difficult to digest on the web.
Don't use poor quality or oversized images. Edit your images offline before you upload to Cascade.
Organize what you're saying. Write to keep important info near the top.
Provide links within your content to help users find additional info.
Avoid web clichés. Don't use terms like "click here," "welcome to our page" or "in the menu to your left."
Provide good alt text and ensure documents are accessible to those using assistive technologies — or better yet, move the content from your document to a webpage.

Give every page a title. Teasers are a great way to elaborate the purpose of the page.
Left align your text.
Don't overuse bold and italics.
Break content up into skimmable sections. Bullets and headings give the eyes something to rest on.
Use Heading 5 and Heading 6 to organize your content.
Don't paste content directly from sources containing external formatting, including Word.
Don't incorporate non-Cascade web elements (external widgets, animated images, etc.).
Keep the right-hand column clean and shorter than the content area. Don't overwhelm the page.

Keep your menu items down to 8 items or less (deeper menus may need to be longer).
Ensure menu links take you to a page with the same (or very similar) page title.
Turn on parents and siblings in menus unless doing so duplicates your site's banner title.
Use descriptive phrases for your content links — don't use "click here."
Indicate when linking to a document: a sample (pdf) and a sample (doc). Whenever possible, convert documents to PDFs — or better yet, move the content to a webpage for improved accessibility.