This sounds very counter-intuitive, but it follows the 'inverted pyramid' which is a journalistic technique to aid with comprehension.

• Start with the 'need to know': who, what, where, when, why and how.
• Finish with the 'nice to know': supporting information and related information.

This type of writing is accessible for all kinds of readers, and is especially useful when writing for the web, as we know that people only scroll down if they're engaged by what's at the top of the page. If you make the top of the page the most relevant, you stand a better chance of getting all the content read.

You can use paragraph breaks to help guide the reader through our content. You can put key points towards the beginning of paragraphs.

Starting a new paragraph with each sentence that is not directly related to the previous one is a good rule of thumb. Paragraphs should certainly be no more than two or three sentences long.

This is demonstrated below with an example of an old section of text from the University website.

Original text

The course is assessed using a credit system, where lecture units, practical units and tutorials are assigned 10, or unusually 20 credits. A total of 120 credits must be taken each year and from these an average mark is calculated from the percentage attained in each unit. All first-year lecture units are taught over the course of one semester and are assessed through a multiple-choice examination at the end of the semester, except where stated otherwise in the unit description. The first year mark does not contribute to the overall degree classification, but the year must be passed (an overall mark of 40% or more) in order to progress to the second year of the programme.

With paragraphs

The course is assessed using a credit system, where lecture units, practical units and tutorials are assigned 10, or unusually 20 credits. A total of 120 credits must be taken each year and from these an average mark is calculated from the percentage attained in each unit.

All first-year lecture units are taught over the course of one semester and are assessed through a multiple-choice examination at the end of the semester, except where stated otherwise in the unit description.

The first year mark does not contribute to the overall degree classification, but the year must be passed (an overall mark of 40% or more) in order to progress to the second year of the programme.

Headings can be the most important navigation tool for the reader. You should use descriptive headings to give the reader information as to what the rest of the page is about. They are an essential navigation tool for those using a screen-reader, as well as general web users.

Headings and subheadings should always be in sentence case (capitalise the first letter and any proper nouns).

There should only be one 'h1' on a web page – you can set up your headings in word by using the ‘Heading 1’, ‘Heading 2’ and so on within the styles section of the ‘home’ tab. The page title itself is especially important for search engine results, which you can find out more about further down. 

Original content

The course is assessed using a credit system, where lecture units, practical units and tutorials are assigned 10, or unusually 20 credits. A total of 120 credits must be taken each year and from these an average mark is calculated from the percentage attained in each unit.

All first-year lecture units are taught over the course of one semester and are assessed through a multiple-choice examination at the end of the semester, except where stated otherwise in the unit description.

The first year mark does not contribute to the overall degree classification, but the year must be passed (an overall mark of 40% or more) in order to progress to the second year of the programme.

With headers

Course marking and assessment for BSc Anatomical Sciences with Industrial/Professional Experience 

The course is assessed using a credit system, where lecture units, practical units and tutorials are assigned 10, or unusually 20 credits. A total of 120 credits must be taken each year and from these an average mark is calculated from the percentage attained in each unit.

First year

All first-year lecture units are taught over the course of one semester and are assessed through a multiple-choice examination at the end of the semester, except where stated otherwise in the unit description.

Second year

The first year mark does not contribute to the overall degree classification, but the year must be passed (an overall mark of 40% or more) in order to progress to the second year of the programme.

Try to keep sentences short. Sentences should ideally be no more than 25 words. Any longer than this and the reader can not scan them for content and will get lost. 

Try to put the key points at the start and end of the sentence. 

A single, 75-word sentence

The opportunity for improving a web site's usability in the long term is truly exciting but can only be notably impacted if a company does not embrace the need to train its content editors and, after any site improvement is actually made, continues to believe that the site improvement was a 'point in time' exercise rather than an ongoing and continual improvement which could make the site a more usable and effective resource for its users. 

Five sentence: 14, 19, 22, 12 and 14 words.

The opportunity for improving a website's usability in the long term is truly exciting. Unfortunately, it can be notably impacted if the company does not embrace the need to train its content editors.

Also, after any site improvement is actually made, the company may see the site improvement as just a 'point in time' exercise. 

A site's improvement should be seen as an ongoing and continual project. This will make the site a more usable and effective resource for its users.

If you have very concise points, try listing them rather than stringing them into long sentences or separating them with semi-colons. 

Using long-form listing

Q. How can I find out what material falls within the waiver conditions?

A: Details are explained in the following series of guidance notes: No 3 Copyright in Public Records; No 4 Reproduction of Court Forms; No 6 Reproduction of United Kingdom, England, Wales and Northern Ireland Primary and Secondary Legislation; No 8 National Curriculum Material for England; No 9 Reproduction of Government Press Notices for England, Northern Ireland and Wales; No 10 National Curriculum Material for Wales.

Using bullet points

Q: How can I find out what material falls within the waiver conditions?

A: Details are explained in the following series of guidance notes:

• No 3 Copyright in Public Records
• No 4 Reproduction of Court Forms
• No 6 Reproduction of United Kingdom, England, Wales and Northern Ireland Primary and Secondary Legislation
• No 8 National Curriculum Material for England
• No 9 Reproduction of Government Press Notices for England, Northern Ireland and Wales
• No 10 National Curriculum Material for Wales

You should make hyperlinks easy for the reader to understand. They should clearly and concisely reflect the page you are sending them to.

They should make sense out of context with the rest of the text. This is especially important for accessibility – if someone with impaired sight is using a screen-reader, they might give it the instruction “read me all the hyperlinks on this page”. If all the hyperlinks say ‘click here’ this isn’t very useful, nor is it practical to read out a string of URLs.

A reader will also use hyperlinks as a means to scan-read the page, so they need to be informative as well as concise. They are best placed at the end of sentences, or within bulleted lists if you have more than one link you wish to send people to. 

Poor practice

For more information, please click here.

For more information, please visit www.library.manchester.ac.uk/locations-and-opening-hours/.

Good practice

For more information, please visit the Libary opening hours pages. 

For more information, visit:

• Main Library opening hours
• AGLC opening hours
• Eddie Davies opening hours

Pictures on a web page should serve to draw the reader's eye to the caption. The caption should serve to inform the reader about the content on the rest of the page.

Do not use the caption just to describe the image, except where the image is key content (for example, in an online exhibition).

You can use key sections from the body text to make your captions, or summarise a key point.

Poor practice

A‌ member of the Student Team sitting in the Alan Gilbert Learning Commons.

Good practice

The Library Student Team has over 25 members, who are based in the Alan Gilbert Learning Commons.

Avoid using jargon. 

Watch our for wasted words, especially needless adverbs like 'actually', 'quite', 'really' or 'basically'.

Remember who you are talking to. Use 'you' and 'we' wherever possible, instead of 'students' and 'The University of Manchester Library'. Always address your audience directly.

Avoid formatting your text, meaning underlining, italics and bold text. 

• On the web, underlined words are assumed to be hyperlinks.
• Italics can be difficult to read, especially on screens.
• Bold text can be used for emphasis, if necessary. But if you have followed the tips in this guide, your text should be easy to navigate without further emphasis. 

A lot of the points covered already are useful for SEO. Especially tips on headings and hyperlinks.

Try and keep the keywords as short as possible while still conveying all the information needed. Try to keep them to the left hand side of the page (as in subheadings and the starts of paragraphs), as people can then use them to scan the page content.

Think about the way you search for content on the web. If you were searching for the content you’re writing about, what might you type in the search bar? Try to include those keywords in the page title. Try to keep the page title shorter than 55 characters to avoid being cut off in search results.

For example, if your page refers to funding applications for PhD students within Engineering subjects, the page title should read “Funding for Engineering PhDs” rather than “Funding” (nice and short, but not quite enough information) or “Information on funding for postgraduate students within the faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences” (too much information).

Search engines will view generic hyperlinks (‘click here’) as negative. If your page contains lots of links to other sites that are well-optimised for SEO, this will improve your ranking. External links should be monitored to ensure that they are still pointing to the correct information. Links that are incorrect or broken will have a negative impact on SEO

Search engines see images as being important for providing a good user experience. However, they can work against you if they aren't used properly. 

• Images should be as small (in file size) as possible without losing quality. Large images make the page load slower which is a big negative for SEO.
• The image should have a descriptive file name and must include an ALT description and title tag (the text that pops up when you hover over an image). Even if the user never sees this information, search engines will - and it will affect SEO. This is technical stuff, so feel free to ask for advice if you feel unsure about this.

This is an odd one, because it does not affect how a search engine ranks your page, but it is still very important. Again, this is quite technical, so ask for advice if you don't know how to put this in. 

The meta description is the text that appears in search results underneath the page title. It is probably what the reader will use to determine whether that page is worth visiting or not. 

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This text should not be more than 300 characters, and should be descriptive and concise. If you do not include a meta description, the search engine will populate this with what it thinks is important information drawn from the body of the page, typically from the heading and prominent links. This can look very confusing.

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When deciding on a URL for your page, try to make it match the title of the page as closely as possible. This will help both your page ranking, as well as making the page easier to understand if the URL appears elsewhere (for example, in a printed publication).

Use hyphens in the URL if the page title has more than one word, such as 'locations-and-opening-hours', to make it easier to read than 'locationsandopeninghours'.

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