Section Separation (Heading 3)

Some kind of content discussing what the department does and why, perhaps? That's what we are looking for in the initial paragraph. Some emphasis should be placed on addressing common misconceptions about what the department does or doesn't do. For instance, County Counsel might want to address the fact that they do not and cannot provide legal advice to the public. Or, if citizens frequently contact PW to ask about water service and we don't provide water service, then that might be something worth including in your initial paragraphs. This doesn't have to be a long, drawn out paragraph....but it's important to give the information that's needed.

If you are going to cover a variety of topics in your content, you may want to separate that content visually so people can quickly get to the portions that are relevant for them. A Section Separation, like above, is a good way to denote very distinct items. For instance, you might want to have a "What we do...." section followed by a "Licenses and Permits" section. However, if your content is less distinct but still needs some visual separation, use the Sub Section Separation shown below. This gives you a softer break in the content that helps keep the content segmented in bite size pieces/thoughts, but without telling the reader that you're completely switching topics on them.

You may want to call out your mission statement or perhaps a quote that's a compliment from a customer, in a very visual way. To do this, you would make use of a special style that I'm hoping to have Evogov define for us that gives us a dockable floating box in which to include a quote and maybe even a titled box option. I think they might look something like this....

Sub Section Separation (Heading 4)

This content would apply to the main Section Separation topic indicated, but with a slight shift in focus from the preceding paragraph. It's important that, whenever feasible, you break up large content blocks into paragraphs, and visually divide long chains of paragraphs as well. Particularly with online content, readers tend to skim and won't take time to read deeply or long. If they can't get to relevant information quickly, they are likely to either pick up the phone and call, show up at your front counter, or simply get frustrated and perhaps not follow the rules or procedures appropriately.

Getting people to the point as quickly as possible - allowing them to scan the page for visual cues to the precise information they may be looking for is the best policy. It takes a little more thought and time when designing the page content, but it will pay dividends in the end. Remember, the goal of your department pages is to provide convenient and efficient 24x7 access to your customers. When you do this well, you will also reduce the customer impact on your limited staff resources. 

These Section and Sub Section headers are achieved using Heading styles. It's important to note that Heading 1 is "off limits". Heading 1 is used to denote the Page Title. If you use it for other items on your page, you could confuse the system as to what your page is titled and mess with your menus. 

 

Table Styles

There should be two table styles - one for tables with a heading row, and one for tables without a heading row. There may be times when an alternative table style is needed, or when a table is being used to create specific layout areas, but for all general table use, of the two preset styles should be utilized.