The Marshall University website serves as a primary recruitment and communication tool. Copy on your site should be confident but friendly, direct but reassuring, and should reflect a sense of belonging. Use action-oriented language — words like find, get, learn, and discover encourage users to engage.
Do not modify typefaces or colors. These choices were made carefully to adapt Marshall’s established print guidelines for the web.
Do not justify text. Justified text creates uneven spacing between words that makes content harder to read. Keep all body text left-aligned.
Do not use all caps. Some theme components display text in all caps automatically — but content should always be entered in normal sentence or title case.
Headings and Page Structure
HTML provides six heading levels (h1–h6). The theme handles the h1 automatically using the page title — you should never add an h1 in your page content.
The first heading level available to you in your content is Heading 2 (h2). Use h2 for major section titles within a page. Any subsections within that section should use Heading 3 (h3), and so on down the hierarchy.
Rules to Follow
- Never skip heading levels — don’t jump from h2 directly to h4.
- Every heading should introduce content that follows it — don’t use a heading as a standalone decorative element.
- Heading tags should never be links.
- If you need to call attention to a single important sentence that stands alone, use the Alerts shortcode instead of a heading.