FAQ
What does “Best Practices” mean exactly?
Best practices can be defined as the most efficient and effective way of accomplishing a task, based on repeatable procedures that have proven themselves over time for large numbers of people.
The average amount of time spent on a web page: 33 seconds. Make your content count!
General
Make the most of your page real estate and the formatting of your content:
- Put the most important information at the top of the page
- Have a clear title - the content within an H1 tag is prioritized by many search engines
- Break the content up with headings for people who are only scanning for a piece of the data
- Move "fun facts" or less important information to the right column
Images
- People tend to read websites the same way they read print materials - left to right. Put decorative images on the right, unless it's a standard format, such as profile pics on the left.
- Images should be .gif or .jpg files
- Total image size should be less than 100KB (in most cases)
Text Formatting
- Avoid underlining text. On the web, this is commonly accepted practice for links, which may be confusing to some site visitors.
- Bold and italic formatting should be used to draw attention to words and phrases rather than entire sentences
- Avoid copying and pasting directly from Microsoft Word - even though you can't see it, copying from those documents bring in additional mark-up that's difficult for search engines and screen readers to process
Links
- Linked text should start with an action
- Links styles should be applied for all links that go somewhere besides another OHSU web page (internal, external, PDF, Word, Excel)
Avoid the words "click" and "link" in link text
For example:
Good: Download the full report
Bad: Click here for the full report
