General Best Practices

  1. Use shorter paragraphs to make text easier to read on phones.
  2. Make sure physician photos are aligned with other physician photos or text.
  3. If you implement a design on a few pages that contain similar content, make sure that element is on all pages as it improves user experience.
  4. Highlight achievements on “about” pages.
  5. Link internally for physicians in the division instead of to the directory.
  6. Use more descriptive alt attributes. For example, one image’s attribute was just “Dang Research”. Instead it could read “UF Health Oncologist Dr. Dang performs neck cancer research in Gainesville, FL.” Alt attributes are a great way to get additional search presence and help with accessibility.
  7. Start with the highest (H1) and work your way down so Google & other sites can figure out what information is most important on the page because it adds a barrier to users accessing using assistive technologies and goes against general content structure.
  8. If a sub-page serves only to link to other pages, consider adding that link instead as a block on the main page.
  9. If a page only has a PDF document on it or has text and a short PDF document on it, consider also adding that PDF text to the page which will make it more accessible and enhance your site’s SEO.
  10. Avoid using images with text on them. Images with text on them can’t be read by screen readers and cause an accessibility issue. Instead, make sure the text is included on the webpage.
  11. Instead of using “Click Here” for a link, try to embed the link into a page or use more descriptive text to move the focus to the actual content. The word “click here” is ineffective for screen reader users that scan for links. The most unique content of the link should be presented first, as screen reader users will often navigate the links listed by searching via the first letter. For example, instead of putting “Click here to see the Pregnancy Brochure,” use For more information about pregnancy, view the Pregnancy Brochure.
  12. Instead of underlining texts to emphasize them, bold the text or use italics. Underlining text can often confuse people because the underline is also used to indicate when text takes people to a hyperlink.
  13. Use bold to highlight words and italics to highlight larger sections of information. Bold is used for people to find specific words within a large body of text. For example, location, time, price, emergency note. When you bold additional text or sentences, you can make the text more overwhelming to read and the important information more difficult to find.
  14. Make sure overview pages link to sub-pages in the menu. On mobile, visitors won’t be able to see what the sub-pages are so highlighting them using card blocks or within bodies of text can tell mobile visitors what to expect. We advise against using bullet points to hyperlink to other sections because they do not present well or provide detail about the sections and they disrupt the website flow.
  15. When you want to link to a webpage, instead of including the url in the text, list the name of the webpage in the text and hyperlink that to the webpage. This makes the page cleaner and the link easier for people with accessibility needs to access because they understand what the hyperlink goes to and do not have to listen to the screen reader read out the url elements.