Headings

Headings should be properly formatted and use sentence case.

In titles, headings and subheadings, use sentence case. That means you capitalise the first letter and any words that would use capitals in a normal sentence.

Avoid using all capital letters.

Headings should not use a full stop at the end.

There is no need to make heading text bold. Doing so may make the content underneath the headings difficult to read.  

Nest your headings correctly (Header 2)

You should always nest your headings correctly.

For example, most of the text of your page will be paragraph text, like this. The first heading of any page is always H2, because the title of the page is in H1. 

The same subject, continued with a sub-topic (Header 3)

After the H2 heading, your headings must be correctly nested. An H3 heading should be a sub-topic of whatever you’re discussing under the H2 paragraph.

Sub-topic of sub-topic (Header 4)

A sub-topic of a paragraph labelled H3 should be labelled in H4. 

Never use heading text to make paragraph text bold

Never use headings to make paragraph text bolder or more eye-catching. For example:

Never use headings to make paragraph text bolder or more eye-catching. 

This is not a readable experience for our audience and goes against the University's accessibility guidelines. 

Watch the video

Our subheadings video from the Effective Digital Content training gives more advice about best practice for subheadings.

Transcript

If you can't watch the video, you can download the transcript instead.