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Format the news area of your home page

Key things to remember

The more you add the longer your page will be, making it more difficult for readers to scan and find what they need. They will leave your site rather than persevere with too much information.

See the Web Team homepage for an example of best practice for formatting the news area.

Elements in each news item

1. Bold headline/title (linked or unlinked)
2. Date. In brackets beside the headline/title eg (1 Sept) or as part of the news item eg Web Administrators Forum, 12 August
3. One or two sentences (more detail/text than this is linked to on another web page)

Note: If headline is unlinked, it displays as bold, black text. Do not change the text colour to blue as this denotes a link.

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How to add an item to your news section

The 'News and Events' (or 'Features') section of your home page has styles built in for you to use.

News and Events bar

• The News and Events bar is formatted H3 (heading 3) from the format drop-down menu in Properties

Create a new item
Press Enter anywhere within the News and Events area inserts a grey line. This separates each item
Formatting a news item
Start each item with a headline. This creates an easy to scan layout with left-aligned text/links (do not align left as this is automatically styled when you type) Headline is bold text Link on headline Unlinked items also have bold text Keep unlinked bold headlines black. Do not change to blue. (Blue is the default link colour and readers will expect to link somewhere) Body of item is plain unbolded text (not italics and not red)
Create a new line within an item (without grey line) Shift + Enter (otherwise known as a 'break' or 'soft return'). This gives you a new line for text (but no grey line) Shift + Enter twice creates another paragraph (without inserting a grey line)
Include a date with each item
Either, add date when item added in brackets after the headline, eg (18 August) Or, date is part of news item eg "...forum held 9 July" A date clarifies for readers when an item was added and gives confidence in your site At a glance you can tell when items need archiving/replacing
Bullet points
Press 'Enter' to create a new item. Type headline Press 'Enter' again (at this stage it will to have a grey underline in the wrong place but that is ok) Create list as you usually would. The grey underline disappears and bullet list forms as per normal
Change text format from paragraph to none in properties to remove grey lines within a paragraph of text or list

Pages to link to from the news area

Depending on your needs you may link to one or more of the list below.

• an existing item elsewhere, either another UC site or external to UC. Do not recreate existing items in your site). Eg if coms dev has an item related to your department, link to that site. (See Web Style Guide formatting links)
• newly created page/section in your site
• upcoming seminars
• dedicated news area within your site (create a news section in your site explains how to do this)

Related information

• Create a news section in your site