Abbreviations

Abbreviations don't have full stops:

• eg not e.g.
• Dr not Dr.
• Prof not Prof.

Acronyms

Spell out acronyms at first mention unless they're well known, eg UK, US, EU. This includes University school or service names, eg Corporate Web Development (CWD). You can use the acronym to refer to the unit after this.

Only include an acronym if you're going to use it again later.

Academic unit names

Use title case for the names of Schools, Institutes and other academic units, eg School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development.

Addresses and contact details

Contact details should be listed as follows:

Development and Alumni Relations Office
(Address if necessary)
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 7250 
Fax: +44 (0) 191 208 5905 
Email: alumni-office@ncl.ac.uk
www.ncl.ac.uk/alumni

Always use the international format for telephone numbers, unless you're writing for a completely local audience. Break up the number with spaces. Telephone should be written in full. The same format should be followed for fax and textphone numbers.

The email should be written as one word, with no hyphen, and the address should be hyperlinked.

The web address should be hyperlinked and not include http://.

Ampersands (&)

Only use ampersands in navigation (ie side menus) to help shorten titles. Use 'and' in page titles and all other text.

Apostrophes

Apostrophes are used to indicate missing letters (eg you're welcome) or possession (eg Kate's bag).

Missing letters

• it’s is short for ‘it is’ or 'it has'
• we'll is short for 'we will'
• you're is short for 'you are'

Possession

Its means belonging to it.

For nouns and most names add an apostrophe plus an s:

• the student's assignment was submitted on time
• Sam's assignment was submitted on time
• a Master's degree in Biochemistry

For personal names ending in -s add an apostrophe plus an s:

• Chris's office is in the Percy Building

For organisations and place names ending in -s add just an apostrophe:

• St James' Park is the home of Newcastle United

For plural nouns add an apostrophe plus an s:

• the children's performance was well attended

For plural nouns ending in -s add just an apostrophe:

• the students' group work was excellent
• the renovation is expected to end in four weeks' time
• our suite of Masters' courses

Plural forms

Apostrophes are never used to form the plurals of nouns, for abbreviations or for dates made up of numbers:

• pizzas will be provided at the event
• the CEOs of local businesses were invited to attend
• things were different in the 1970s

Audio content

Audio files should be hosted on a dedicated delivery service, eg Soundcloud or Audioboo, and embedded in your site.

Bold

Use of bold online helps make content scannable; it adds emphasis to keywords and phrases. Making entire sentences or paragraphs bold defeats the point of emphasis.

Highlighting key words and phrases in bold is also useful for search engine optimisation.

Brackets

Use round brackets (), not square brackets [].

Bulleted lists

• follow on from a colon
• start each point with lower case and don’t end with punctuation
• begin with keywords
• keep each point short – aim for around 10 words

Capitalisation

Capitalise:

• school and service names, eg Newcastle University Business School
• where a noun is specific, eg the University
• regions, eg the North East
• term names, eg Spring Term
• degree titles, eg BA Honours in History

Don't capitalise:

• general nouns, eg all three faculties have a head of school
• higher education
• further education
• honours, eg a first class honours degree
• the first word following a colon

Contractions

Contractions help to make your text more conversational, shorter and easier to read online.

Use contractions where possible eg we’ll, you're.

Avoid using should've, could've, would've etc – these are hard to read.

Dates

Dates have no punctuation and are presented as day month year eg Friday 28 February 2014

A date range should look like this:

• 2011 to 2012
• Friday 28 February to Monday 3 March

If space is an issue, eg in tables, use truncated months eg Jan, Feb

Decades and centuries should be written as:

• 1930s not 1930's
• 20th century not twentieth century

Degree classifications

• first class honours
• 2:1 honours degree not upper second class honours degree
• 2:2 honours degree not lower second class honours degree
• third class honours

Degree titles and awards

Use title case:

• BA Honours in History
• Single Honours, Joint Honours, Master's etc

Documents

Documents for upload to the website should be under 8MB.

Find out how to name documents and linking to documents in our T4 Guide.

Email addresses

Email addresses follow the form: name@ncl.ac.uk and should be an active link.

'Newcastle' is abbreviated to ncl.

Eg, etc, and ie

Don't use full stops after or between these notations.

Expandable content

An expandable box is a content type that allows you to show and hide information on the page. See a live example on the Travel to the University page.

We recommend you use this content type at the end of a page as it acts as a visual line on screen. We saw in user testing how people don't expect content to follow expandable boxes and so stop scrolling.

Use this type of content sparingly; you don’t want to make your users work too hard to get to your content.

Titles for expandable boxes follow the same principles as sub-headings. They should be up to 30 characters.

The content of expandable boxes should be shorter than the main content on your page. It should be a maximum of 100 words and follow our general guidance on writing for the web.

File naming

File names should:

• be short and meaningful eg fms-strategy.pdf not fmsv1.pdf
• be lower case
• not include version numbers or dates – this means the document can stay in the same location each year
• be single words where possible
• use hyphens to separate words if necessary, eg university-web-strategy.pdf

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

If you write and structure your content with your user and their top task in mind, you won't need them.
Problems with FAQs:

• they're often not ‘frequently asked questions’ but 'questions we wish you'd ask'
• they duplicate information leading to conflicting content
• they create extra work to make updates in multiple places
• content is not where it is expected – FAQs are usually the last resort

Make sure you take genuine enquiries and put the answers in context on your site.

Gender

Use gender neutral terms. Instead of he/she or his/hers use them, their or they.

Headings

Page titles are the first thing visitors to your site see and tell them what each page is about. They can also be seen out of context, eg in a search results page.

Your page titles need to be clear and meaningful so a user knows whether the information they want is on your page. They should:

• be less than 50 characters (including spaces)
• be written in title case eg Student Life not Student life
• begin with keywords to support scan reading
• be simple and clear; jargon is difficult to understand and makes pages hard to find

Sub-headings help to break up content on the page. They make text easier to scan and help your users pick out relevant information. They should:

• be less than 30 characters (including spaces)
• be written in sentence case, eg Student life in Newcastle
• begin with keywords to support scan reading

Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks are very important to reading and navigating online content.

Your hyperlink text should:

• be descriptive – that means no 'click here'
• be short phrases – don't link entire sentences
• open in the same browser tab/window – we leave it up to the user to decide whether they want to open a new tab/window
• be checked regularly to make sure they work

When linking to a document include the file type and the file size in brackets after the link, eg linking to documents (PDF: 72KB)

Hyphens

Use a hyphen to split up two of the same vowel in a word:

• co-ordination
• micro-organism
• co-operate

Hyphens can also be used in compound adjectives and to join prefixes to words, for example:

• computer-aided
• custom-built
• pre-1900
• post-dated

Images

See our separate image guide for advice on selecting, resizing and saving images.

Introduction

The first paragraph on the page should introduce the subject. It often has a distinctive style from the main body content. This introductory text should:

• be less than 50 words
• summarise the main point of the page
• use keywords to support search engine optimisation

Italics

Italics are difficult to read online so we don't use them.

You should use 'single quotation marks' if referring to a document or to a word or phrase not commonly accepted as part of the English language.

Lists

Using lists online helps to:

• break up large blocks of text
• introduce whitespace
• make your content instantly easier to read

Bulleted lists

When writing bulleted lists make sure that you:

• follow on from a colon
• begin each point with a lowercase letter
• don't add punctuation at the end of a bullet point (or at the end of the list)
• use a minimum of three bullets but no more than six
• begin with keywords
• keep each point short, aim for up to 10 words

Numbered lists

You should only use numbered lists if you are guiding a user through a series of steps or a top 5: in all other cases use bullets. Here are our top tips for writing numbered lists.

1. They don't need to follow from a colon.
2. Start each step with a capital letter.
3. End each step with a full stop – each step should be a complete sentence.

Measurements

Use numerals for the quantity, even for numbers below 10, followed by a space if you are using the full word for the unit. If using the abbreviation, don’t put a space after the numerals and don't use full stops. For example:

• 5 kilogrammes, 100 metres or 128 megabytes
• 5kg, 100m or 128MB

Be careful to use the correct mix of upper and lower case in abbreviations:

• g, kg (gram, kilogram)
• mm, cm, m, km (millimetre, centimetre, metre, kilometre)
• MHz (megahertz)
• KB (kilobyte), MB (megabyte), GB (gigabyte)

Use metric rather than imperial measurements. For example:

• temperature: Celsius rather than Fahrenheit
• weight: grams and kilograms rather than pounds and ounces

If using imperial measurements, follow them with the metric equivalent in brackets, eg 5 miles (8 kilometres).

Use this online metric converter to help.

Menu items

Webpages should normally be linked from the menu so that users can navigate easily through your site, and to help with search engine optimisation.

Link text in the menu of your site should match the destination’s page title. For example the link to this page in the menu is ‘Editorial Style’. The character limit for both page titles and menu items is 50 characters.

Exception to linking pages from the menu

Occasionally it’s impractical to link all pages from the menu if there are a number of pages within a section. If a menu is too long the user will need to scroll further to find content.

In these cases we recommend you hide pages from the navigation and link directly from the content on the page. For example the postgraduate website does not include the list of available degrees in the menu. This is because there are over 300 postgraduate degrees available and this would make the menu too long. Instead, the degrees are listed alphabetically on the Postgraduate Degrees List A-Z page.

Money

Names of currencies are written in lower case eg pound, yen, euro.

Pence should be abbreviated when used without pounds eg, 50p, but not £1.50p.

Million and billion should be written in full in lower case, with no space after the numerals. In pages that repeatedly mention sums in millions or billions, it is acceptable to abbreviate, eg:

• £15 million or £15m
• £2 billion or £2bn

Numbers

Spell out numbers from one to nine. Use numerals from 10 upwards.

Exceptions:

• when a number begins a sentence it is spelt out, even if there are further statistics, eg Sixty-four students graduated, 31 were international students
• percentages are always presented as numerals, eg 1%, 20%, even when starting a sentence
• for rankings present ordinal numbers as numerals, eg 1st not first
• fractions should be spelt out and not include a hyphen, eg two thirds not two-thirds
• academic awards, eg 2:1, and grades, eg IELTS 6.5
• numerals are used in tables for statistics, money and times

Paragraph length

A paragraph should be around 50 words. Shorter paragraphs are easier to read on screen.

Percent (%)

Use % not per cent or percent.

Percentages are always presented as numerals, eg 1%, 20%, even when starting a sentence.

Quotation marks

Single quotation marks are always used, except for a quote within a quote; here you would use double quotation marks within single quotes.

Full stops are used outside the quotation mark if the quote is part of a sentence and inside the quotation mark if the quote is a whole sentence.

Quotes

Quotes can be styled to make them stand out from the main content. For sites built using Contribute this style is called a blockquote, in T4 the pull quote content type should be used.

Blockquotes and pull quotes should be around 30 words (no more than two short sentences) and contain no hyperlinks.

If you have a source for the quote this should be added on a separate line, be meaningful and, if relevant, hyperlinked.

Sentence case

Sentence case is where the first word and only proper nouns start with capital letters, eg £3.8m funding for new Blood and Transplant Research Unit. It is used for sub-headings and body content.

Sentence length

Sentences should be around 20 words. Keep them short and simple in structure.

Spaces

Use one space after a full stop, not two.

Spelling

Some of the main points of spelling style are as follows:

• use -ise not -ize, eg realise not realize and organisation not organization
• website and online are both one word not two
• email not e-mail
• medieval not mediaeval
• adviser not advisor
• fieldwork is one word but course work is two separate words

Problem spellings

Beware problem spellings – below are just a few examples of commonly misspelt words:

• accommodation
• liaise
• definitely
• Millennium

Keep an eye out for homophones (words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings) too:

• practice – noun; practise – verb
• advice – noun; advise – verb
• effect – noun;  affect – verb
• dependent (unable to do without) and dependant (a person who relies on another for financial support)
• stationery (pens, pencils etc) and stationary (not moving)
• compliment (a statement of praise or admiration) and complement (a thing that enhances something else)

Tables

Tables should be used for data only. They can cause problems for screen readers when used for design purposes.

Telephone numbers

Always use the international format for telephone numbers unless you’re writing for a completely local audience. A space should be included after +44, with the 0 from the dialling code in brackets.

Telephone should be written in full, with spaces used to break up the number. For example: Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 7250

The same format should be followed for mobile, fax and textphone numbers.

Times

We use the 24 hour clock to make times accessible to international audiences.

Here are some principles for presenting times:

• 17.30 not 5:30pm or 1730hrs
• 00.00 not midnight
• 12.00 not midday or 12 noon

For periods of time use a hyphen between start and end times, eg 10.00 - 11.30

Title case

Title case is where all important words are capitalised, eg Careers and Employability. It is used for page titles, menus items and degree titles.

Underline

Underlined text should only ever be a hyperlink.

Upper case

USING ALL UPPERCASE MAKES TEXT DIFFICULT TO SCAN AND CAN BE SEEN AS SHOUTING. Don’t use upper case for entire sentences, headings or emphasis.

URLs

It should be possible to tell what a page will contain just by reading the web address (URL). Folder and file names should be as short as possible while remaining meaningful. The same principles apply to naming documents, images and other files.

Names should:

• be a full single word if possible
• be entirely lower case
• have words separated with hyphens, not spaces, dots or underscores

Good URLs look like this:

• www.ncl.ac.uk/undergraduate/support/childcare
• www.ncl.ac.uk/marine/staff
• www.ncl.ac.uk/sport/events/boat-race

Video content

Videos should be hosted on a dedicated delivery service, eg YouTube or NUVision, and then embedded into your site. Information about the University YouTube channel can be found on our video hosting page (Internal access only).