Page design

A lot of elements are involved in designing content presentation on a page, or across multiple pages.

This guidance is based on the Readability Guidelines.

Paragraphs

Divide content up into short paragraphs. Chunked content is easier to absorb as smaller units of content are easier to process, understand and remember. Text divided into distinct visual units helps users scan. 

Sub-headings

If you have a page with several paragraphs, organise the paragraphs with sub-headings. These should indicate what the paragraph is about. This helps users scan page content for what they are looking for.

Bullet points

Use bullet points to split up long sentences.

They should:

• complete a sentence,
• be front-loaded with the most important information,
• start with the same language element, like verb, noun, adjective,
• be grammatically correct. 

Jump or anchor links

Consider using jump/anchor links if your page is quite long. 

Feature boxes

These allow you to promote a particular part of your content.

We use the orange feature box on our pages.

Tools

A content tool is content that users interact with in ways other than reading.

Examples:

• Calculator, Money Savings Expert website
• Birth date eligibility checker, GOV.UK website
• Date picker, Easyjet website

These examples are all inclusively designed.

Images, infographics and videos

If you decide to present content as images, infographics and videos, make sure it is inclusively designed:

• images, use alt text if the image contains useful information
• infographics, provide a text version of the infographic
• videos, provide captions on the video and a full transcript.