Our website's theme is designed to balance our brand expression, accessibility for our users, consistency across the site, and your creativity. Make sure your pages stand out because of their subject, voice and imagery, rather than by trying to too visually different to our other pages.
Included below are some things to think about when editing.
Don't fight the theme
If you find yourself manually overriding presentation or display elements of the theme, think twice! The theme has been intentionally designed with its defaults, so avoid being too creative with how things display outside of changing text, images, and colours.
Let [email protected] know if you think an overall fix needs to be done, e.g. if you think headings need more space around them, or buttons need to be bigger, etc. Then we can make sure we make any changes globally.
Headings are structure
Headings should not be used to feature text. Headings are structural elements on the page which should describe the text that follows in that section. Using them just to make text big and flashy will confuse screen readers (and anything that uses page structure, like table of contents, and Google / search engines). Read more here and here.
The recommendation to make text "pop" is to use a normal paragraph block, at 'large' size, with or without a background colour (like a nice 'faded' brand colour).
Avoid horizontal rules before headings
Headings themselves visually and structurally separate sections of the page. Horizontal rules are not required, can make pages visually noisy, and will be read out by screen readers (even as frustratingly as "dimmed collapsed on top, horizontal separator"), which can be confusing.
Choose colour combinations carefully
Different colour combinations can make reading and engaging with our content very hard for people with visual or cognitive accessibility needs. Make sure you choose accessible combinations. Read more in our colour guide.
Knowledge base
Category
- Content editing