Text Formatting

A few rules govern how text is structured across the site. They exist so that pages stay consistent with one another — and stay consistent over time, as content is added by different people across many years.

The short version: describe what your content is, and let the site handle how it looks. Mark a heading as a heading, a paragraph as a paragraph, and the styling and spacing are applied for you, everywhere, automatically. When you instead reach for a visual workaround — a bigger heading level because it looks nicer, or extra blank lines to push things apart — the result tends to look right on the day you write it and wrong later.

The rules

• Page Headings & the H1 Rule — every page gets exactly one main heading, with subheadings nested beneath it in order.
• Spacing & Paragraphs — the site supplies the space between paragraphs, so you don't need to add blank lines.

If something looks wrong

If a heading looks too large, or two blocks sit too close together, that's a styling question rather than a content one. Tell your developer what looks off instead of working around it in the editor — a fix made in the design applies across the whole site, while a workaround typed into one page helps only that page, and usually stops helping the next time the site is updated.