Website Style Guide

Glossary of Style

Apostrophes

Define British usage.

Filename Extensions

Give filename extensions in all caps with no full stop.

Footer

Establish a footer syntax and stay with it throughout a site, or within portions of a site that are part of a unit.

Full stop

Define British usage.

Links

• E-mail links should be easily identifiable as such and should include the e-mail address being linked to, for those who use e-mail applications outside their browser.
• Links to external pages should open in a new browser window, unless there is a specific reason to link to an interior page and permission from the site owner has been granted.
• Avoid extra underlined space at the beginning or end of hyperlinks.
• Avoid using the end punctuation of a sentence as part of a hyperlink.
• Avoid using "click here" as a link.

Lists (bulleted or numbered)

• If the list items comprise long clauses, long phrases, or sentences written on separate lines, use a period after each bulleted/numbered/lettered item.
• Do not use ending punctuation for single words or short phrases in a list.
• Bulleted and numbered items may or may not be indented.

Logo

Always make sure your style guide has information about proper use of your company’s logo an/or your site logo, including all variations and approved methods of rendering in techniques such as Flash.

Numbers

Spell out numbers from one to ten except in these situations:

• When a sentence begins with a number.
• When the numbers have technical significance or need to stand out for quick comprehension (such as tables, statistical material, money amounts, clock time, etc.)
• When a range of two or more related numbers are used, at least one of which is higher than ten (example: from 6 to 15 people attended).

Quotation marks

Define British usage.

Semicolons

Need our policy for web – which is almost never use.

That/which

Define British usage.

Time References

Avoid unclear time perspectives, such as "should be determined soon", or relative time references such as "last year". Time references must be made in terms of specific dates, since there is usually no publication date on a Web page to which the user can refer.