Web Style Guide: Emphasis

Overemphasis

Question: What's the most important thing here? Answer: Nothing.

WordPress has very simple editing tools, and for the most part, this is a really good thing.

Often, when a new WordPress users has something important to post on the web, they might ask where the button to change the text background color is, or how to make the font huge.

Believe me: I realize it sometimes it seems like it’s really difficult to get the point across.  But if you keep your text clean and well-formatted, you shouldn’t need to shout all that loud to be heard.

Here’s a rule of thumb you should consider when posting news:  If everything is emphasized, then nothing is emphasized!

When you do need to emphasize something, keep it simple.  Yellow highlighter is great if you’re working with paper, but on the web it’s garish and ugly.  If you stick to good style in the rest of your posts, simply bolding the important text will get your point across. A slightly less obvious form of emphasis would be to italicize part of the text to encourage the reader to stop and think about a particular span of text.

Keep it simple and you won’t need to hit your reader over the head with a two-by-four of yellow text to get the point across.

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