This is the accordion body, which can accommodate text, styled text, and additional formatting tools like lists and images.
Using Headers
Just like in regular page text, headers can help guide your reader through the content in an accordion.
Every webpage should have a few larger sentences at the top—like these—that describe what will be covered on the page.
So: we're here to provide guidelines and styles for the Bowdoin College website.
Our webpages are here to provide helpful information to our visitors. College websites are not designed to be archives or storage areas for everything your department has ever produced. Just like a garden, they require regular weeding and feeding—so make time at least twice a year to check on your content and how well it's helping your audiences.
Did you know? You can schedule reviews for your pages and you'll be reminded when it's time to update them!
This is a great feature for pages that contain data that updates regularly: like costs, office hours, or schedules.
Text areas are the most common element of your webpages. They will contain tools that are familiar to you if you've used Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or other writing and editing software.
It's important to guide a reader through your page by using visual cues: no one likes a giant wall of text! In addition to using headers like the one above, you can style your text, add lists and links, and insert helpful separator items like horizontal lines.
In addition to the features found in a standard text area, there are several other ways to guide your visitors to information that they need. We'll cover these below.
Think of these as very pretty buttons. They allow you to link to another page using an image, rather than just text. They have a few important rules:
Consider using accordions to group similar items that might have lengthy details, like:
Never put emergency or critical information inside an accordion! Put yourself into the shoes of your reader: you wouldn't want to use an extra click to find an emergency phone number or a timely weather update.
This content module creates a special list for links, rather than depending on links within paragraph text. These are used to link to other pages on the shorinji-kempo.net site: we're helping our visitors find what they need, even if it's not on our own pages.
The options for related links include the ability to display them in one or two columns, and you can choose from the following category headers:
Using horizontal line breaks and columns is another great way to break up information on the page.
There are two automated content types that you can add to your department or office homepages: Stories, and Events. Each of these content types will pull data from another source—like the campus calendar or the news site—and put the relevant information on your page.
Let's talk about photos and photo galleries, or colors and typography.