Keep It Simple

It is tempting to dress things up, to try to make your page or post stand out from the rest, to try to make it special. Resist the urge!

It is far better for this site if you keep it simple. This site has been designed to look decent on a wide variety of devices, from desktop computers to mobile phones. It content has been released out to the world in the form of RSS feeds and Google indexes. This means that the content you create will be viewed in many contexts other than the one you happen to be seeing it in right now. To see this in action, try making this window very narrow. See how the site changes to accommodate that action?

Your job is to add and maintain content on this site. If you have a concern about how that content looks, or if you need a kind of presentation that is just not available now, please contact the communications office at Perpich to share your feedback. We will do our best to accommodate your needs.

Meanwhile, keep it simple!

This means you should make every effort to limit your formatting choices to headlinesbold and italic text, and bulleted or numbered lists.

Remember to always highlight meaningful text for linksnever use “click here.”

If you just need one picture on a page or post, please make it the featured image. If you need to show a set of images, always use the “Add Media” button and use the right aligned option. If you need a gallery of images, please use the mosaic tiled gallery. Take the time to add a reasonable title and caption to any image you upload to the site, so others can reuse it easily.

Don’t ever force a link to open in a new window. (Really, don’t!)

Don’t type in all caps. Ever! Yes, some text appears in all caps once you look at it after publishing it, but these are design choice made by the theme and those choices could change. Let the theme make design choices, you should always type in normal mixed case.

Always type phone numbers with their area codes, with dashes, without parenthesis: 651-379-2600.

Always type email addresses in full and linked with mailto: links for sending email.

Don’t center text.

Don’t use tables except in their simplest forms.

Don’t grow or shrink the font size or change its colors with the WYSIWYG options in the WordPress editor.

Review content after pasting it from applications like Microsoft Word. Pasting content will rarely result in exactly the markup you want. Most styling and linking should survive, but it is important to review what you pasted to be sure.

Make sure your content is strong and clear, let the design of the site work for you.

Thank you for helping us maintain the integrity, legibility, and responsiveness of this website.

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