10 Article heading
The best way to think of an article heading is like a headline in a newspaper billboard, which is about getting people's attention.
Because people are generally in a hurry these days, a heading needs to be short and sweet, so that it does not have to be read word-by-word, but can be simply understood, almost subconsciously. That means avoiding trying to be over-clever, but rather be succinct and clear. When a reader comes across your article's heading, they will be looking for reassurance that they are at the right one, so it needs to be consistent with the wording of the link from which it was invoked, especially in search engine listings.
If a headline might be too long to be readily taken in, consider simplifying it, and using a byline under it to qualify it. Again, this is how newspaper billboards were laid out, by making sure that the headline was concise, and using the byline to make sure it was unambiguous. A good test is to quickly glimpse the heading, and if you can readily take it in and make sense of it, it is OK, otherwise, simplify it. You do not want your readers getting the wrong idea because they were in a hurry.
Headings for sections, subsections and asides are also important, for the same reasons. They should be indicative to help the reader make the decision whether to read what follows. Headings are the complement to the navigation links, since they are the target, so they need to match the link intent, but also be succinct, because the reader is not there to read just the headings. Put them before any content, such as images, because it can be confusing as to whether the image is for the content under the previous heading or the next. Confusion is a distraction from concentrating on the narrative.
Capitalisation
△Some languages do not have capitals, but for the rest, when to use capitals in headings might be confusing, especially since some publishing houses enforce a particular style.
In general writing, we do not use initial capitals except for the first word in a sentence and proper names. The first word makes sense because the full stop is hardly noticeable, which might be overlooked if the next sentence started with lower-case. Double-spaces after full stops used to be the norm to provide more visual discontinuity between sentences, but they only show as a single space on web pages. Capitalisation of proper names is so that we take special notice of what is supposedly important words with special meanings.
However, when it comes to tiles of books and songs, influential style guides have decided that every noun, verb, adjective and adverb gets the treatment, effectively destroying how we usually interpret what might normally be everyday nothing-special phrases.
Smallsite Design does not enforce any rules about capitalisation, leaving it to writers to follow their country's official style guide, convention within their profession, or their own rules. Unfortunately, people often assume that because some places enforce prolific capitalisation, it is the way it must be done. You will see this in YouTube title, where nothing is enforced, but many give their video titles the full treatment.
One of the basic rules cited for titles of works is to capitalise the first and last words. Now this might have come about because in plain text, putting a title that is only capitalised on the first word means that it may not be obvious when the title ends, especially if there is more text after it. On websites, titles within text will use either a
It is up to you to decide what capitalisation to use for headings, but because people spend most of their time reading sentences and not titles, the subconscious process of recognising and interpreting words will be biased to what is done most, so providing headings that use normal sentence capitalisation rules would tend to be more quickly subconsciously understood than prolific capitalisation. Headings are a signpost, and the more readily that they are understood, the less likely they are to be misunderstood or misinterpreted, or interrupt a reader's though process.
The perils of oversimplifying
△Oversimplifying can lead to misinterpretation, due to the heading not supplying enough context for the reader to get the overall stance of what follows.
A modern example of how oversimplification has resulted in sabotaging the intent is the phrase Black Lives Matter
, which has been misinterpeted as meaning only black lives matter
. Of course, that assessment is usually by those looking for a reason to refuse to acknowledge that there has been hundreds of years of systemic racism and oppression.
Simply changing the phrase to Black Lives Matter Too
would have changed the immediate interpretation to meaning that black lives are just as important as others. It implies the truth that they have not been so important. It would have given many less ammunition to challenge its intent, and less likely for those who were rather ambivalent to be open to the reactionary interpretation of the original.
Another example is a video titled Why the US was Lucky to get Donald Trump, which on first reading gives the impression that it is just another right-wing rant, and thus easy to ignore by those opposed to indulging them. However, just by changing the title to Why the US was sort of lucky to get Donald Trump, it gives the impression that it is not to be read literally but indicating another take.
In this case, the thesis was that because of Trump's many flaws, both personally and politically, he exposed the many weaknesses in the supposed checks and balances in the US political system. That is completely different from the first impression of the title. The presenter, George Monbiot, is apparently well known for his left-leaning views, but that is irrelevant if he is unknown to the viewer.
The learning lesson here is that headings must stand on their own, and not rely upon the reader knowing about the context of the article or the author and their views. Judicious choices over wording can make a huge difference to first impressions and thus to whether an article gets read or not.
However, sometimes a short phrase is useful or nice and succinct, but it might be too ambiguous. In this case, use a byline, usually with a smaller text size, to provide the clarifying context. The headline attracts while the byline clarifies. Between them, a person should be in no doubt as to what an article is about. These are only really suitable for article headings, not sections or the like.
Section and other internal element headings can be longer, though a shorter label in the navigation bar mitigates against clutter, while providing enough differentiation from other labels there to make quick decisions from. The label just has to be close enough in its words to the heading that it links to for the reader to instantly be in no doubt that they have arrived at the right element. Everything has to be clear and unambiguous for navigation to work well.