Keeping it clean
By Diane Austin I know you’ve been there. At some point, you’ve landed on a web page that had a misspelling or broken link. Remember the frustration you felt and how it made you feel about the owner of the page? If you’re anything like me, you probably lost some trust in the site and…
Don’t Click Here
By Diane Austin If you want your audience to find, read, and understand your web content, you need to present it in a way that makes it easy for them. That means using the right words and putting them in the right context. People come to your website to get information or to accomplish a…
Buttons vs. Text Links: The Inside Scoop
“Could I get a button on this page?” This used to be one of the most-asked questions by our web contributors. Since the button tool is available for you now to make buttons yourself, it’s time you got the inside scoop on when to use them—and when not to. When Buttons Work In the old…
Understanding Keywords
To make your web page more findable, it’s important to understand how and where to use keywords. A keyword is simply a word or phrase that describes your website, web page, or document. It’s what someone would type in a search box if they were looking for your content. You can make your page more…
How To Find And Fix Broken Links
One of the most annoying things for website visitors is clicking a link and getting an error message. This is known as a “404 error” and in an ideal world, we would never see it. While you can’t control broken links outside your department pages, you can — and should — eliminate them on your own…
Links Matter
I was reading an article this morning by usability expert Jakob Nielsen, which discusses the importance of being careful and intentional about what your links say. You can read the full post (First 2 Words: A Signal for the Scanning Eye), but I’ll also sum up here: If there is one principle that’s the most…
Linking To Frequently-Referenced Documents
As you develop your webpages, you may find that it would be helpful to your users to provide a document that is generated by a different department. This happens frequently with documents such as Degree Completion Sheets and the Academic Calendar. However, if each department saves their own copy of the document generated by a different department,…
How (and When!) To Use Anchors
You’ve probably noticed the button in WordPress’ editor toolbar that looks like a bookmark – that is the anchor tool. The anchor tool, plus the linking tool, allows you to place anchors in your pages and create links to them. Anchors are used when you want to link to a specific section on a page,…
Links: Open In A New Window Or Not?
When creating links in your webpages in WordPress, by default the new page is set to open in the same window. When the user visits your page and clicks on a link, the view changes from the original page to the new view of the web page the link opened. If the user wishes to…