coe-staff: COE Web style guide

[Cody Pinkston]

Good Morning,

At yesterday's meeting, Jeff Woodbury alluded to style guidelines and conventions for the Web as a way to establish consistency across our website, at least as it relates to content. To assist content owners in this regard, we've put together a COE style guide<https://coe.uoregon.edu/styleguide/>. It is meant to help answer questions about what to capitalize, how to abbreviate, and the like. Hopefully you will find it a useful resource. With your feedback, it will continue to grow and improve.

The biggest problems with consistency right now are:

  *   Lists. Drupal can automatically format bulleted or numbered lists for you. Separate each element, or line, with the RETURN key, select the whole block of text, and then click whichever list icon you wish. A bullet or number will be inserted where you've made line breaks. If you paste a list from another document, paste the plain text and remove existing numbers or bullets before applying the list style.
  *   Spaces. Just hitting RETURN after a line is called a hard return, and it automatically adds a space between lines or paragraphs. Word-processing programs don't do that by default, so if you hit RETURN twice to add a line break, you're actually adding two.
  *   Headings. Drupal offers a handful of options for formatting text. Most of your text will just use the "Normal" style. If you want a section heading, e.g. "Degree Requirements," you should use "Heading 3." Heading 2 is part of the style sheet because it's the default main page title heading, but you shouldn't use it in your copy.
  *   Hyperlinks. In general, avoid using the actual URL as the text for a hyperlink. But you should also avoid vague words or phrases. For example, say you want to link to information about academic advising. Avoid this: "To learn more about academic advising, go to https://education.uoregon.edu/student-academic-services/academic-advising." By the same token, don't be too vague: "To learn more about academic advising, click here<https://education.uoregon.edu/student-academic-services/academic-advising>." The preferred way is to make the hyperlinked text descriptive of the destination and incidental to the wording, e.g. "The COE offers dedicated academic advising services<https://education.uoregon.edu/student-academic-services/academic-advising> to help ensure steady progress toward your degree."
  *   Galleries. The spirit of a gallery is that it is updated relatively often with new photos. That's why, once you create one, it places thumbnails on your landing page with the heading, "Recent photos." In Drupal-speak, that means the most recently uploaded photos, not the most recently taken photos. If you want to re-order them, simply drag them around in the View window (from within your gallery, after you've logged in) so the four you want to feature are the first four in the group (going across).

Unfortunately, I need to address the erroneous, but apparently widespread, perception that the marketing office is in the business of changing people's website content without notice. To be clear, your content is YOUR content. The only changes site administrators would ever make without notifying you are the types listed above, which help ensure a clean, professional-looking website but do not materially affect the work you've done to that point. It's the difference between straightening someone's tie for them and replacing it with a bandana while they're not paying attention. If you believe someone has substantially changed your content, a respectful inquiry can determine what happened, when, why, and how to fix it.

Cheers,
Cody

________________________________
[Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: cid:3406876785_2874866]Cody Pinkston | Director of Marketing | cpinksto at uoregon.edu<mailto:cpinksto at uoregon.edu>
College of Education, 270 Lokey Ed | 1215 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403 | (P) 541-346-1392
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