Trisha Cupra » 5-minute Fixes

Are Your Headings heading for Disaster?

Trisha Cupra — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:58:38 +0000

The bigger the heading, the more important it is

Are you using headings effectively on your website? Over at buildInternet, Zach Dunn has written a quick article about how to use the HTML Header Tags properly for headings. Header tags are numbered starting at 1, with h1 being the biggest and most important. He created the great graphic above, and you should read his article here.

A newspaper is a classic example of heading hierarchy. The name of the newspaper is biggest, boldest, and at the top of the front page. Then, a bit smaller in size is the front page main story’s heading. And the other stories have smaller headings – the smaller the heading, the shorter and less important the story appears to be.

I’ve added arrows and boxes to this photo of a newspaper’s front page to illustrate the point.

Headings in a newspaper

If this newspaper was a website, the headings in the newspaper would follow this hierarchy:

H1 – White

H2 – Yellow

H3 – Orange

H4 – Blue (same size as orange but not bold)

H5 – Green

If you look at this website below, you’ll see that the headings get smaller for each subsection:

Website headings

Is your site very user-friendly for your visitors? Do you have your information neatly organized under proper headings and subheadings?

More resources on headings/headers:

Variety in Heading and Body Fonts

Optimal HTML Headings for Proper Information Hierarchy in WordPress Blogs

5 Tips to Make Your Headings More User Friendly

Sub-headers are navigation

What you never noticed about Google’s Home Page

Trisha Cupra — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:55:22 +0000

When Google first created its beta (first draft) home page and set up a test to see how well it would work, there was a problem.

“[Our beta testers] would sit in front of the Google screen for 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, a minute…Google was perplexed.”

Interested in what the problem was and how easily it was fixed? Read the article:

What You Never Noticed About Google

To Do List: 101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Website

Trisha Cupra — Tue, 20 May 2008 06:50:49 +0000

Here’s a great ready-made To Do List of quick improvements you can make to your website. Definitely one to bookmark. I know I’ll be working through them. I may not agree with 100% of them, but most look pretty spot-on.

Here are a few items from the list:

Keep background colors and images at a minimum. Backgrounds are often less than visually appealing and can make your site load slowly.
Reduce choices. Avoid overwhelming your visitor with lots of different options.
Stay consistent. Check to make sure that colors and design are in the same general scheme so that visitors know they’re still on your site.
Validate design in alternative browsers. See how your design renders in browsers like Safari, Opera and Firefox to make sure that it looks right no matter who is viewing it.

101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Website

photo credit: booleansplit