Using inserts in your content
Important alerts or notifications
Also available on the homepage, alerts can be used on subpages to highlight important announcements, such as office hour changes or seasonal updates.
Inserts are a versatile tool for highlighting content and drawing attention to key information. They appear in a colored box within the content area, making it easy to emphasize messages, quotes, tips, or calls to action.
Insert orientations
Vertical inserts: Left-aligned in the content area, ideal for emphasizing shorter points or side notes.
Horizontal inserts: Span the full width of the content area, perfect for larger messages, important announcements, or visually breaking up long sections of content.
Best practices
- Use inserts to highlight content that is important or supplemental, such as tips, quotes, or calls to action.
- Keep the text concise and clear. Avoid crowding the insert with too much information.
- Choose the orientation that best fits the message and page layout: vertical for subtle emphasis, horizontal for prominent display.
- Use inserts consistently to maintain a clean and professional look throughout the page.
What to avoid
- Don’t use inserts for standard paragraph text, which reduces their impact.
- Avoid overusing inserts on a single page. Too many highlighted boxes can overwhelm the reader and diminish emphasis.
- Do not place inserts inside other inserts, which can break layout and decrease readability.
Expanded toolkit
Our theme expands the standard insert options, giving content creators a broader toolkit for presenting content in engaging ways. Inserts are not intended to be simply decorative. They provide a flexible method for calling out key information, adding visual hierarchy, and improving the overall reading experience.
Inserts demonstrated
Effective web content delivers value. Every page should have purpose and guide users to the information they need without extra steps or confusion. The ideal approach is to anticipate the needs of anyone who visits your website. Consider your primary and secondary audiences, what categories of information would be relevant to them, and common questions your department receives. With these in mind, you can create well-structured, succinct content that reduces cognitive load and builds trust with your audience.
Brevity is the soul of both wit and websites. To respect your audience’s time, avoid unnecessary jargon and long blocks of text. Instead, prioritize plain language with informative headings, short paragraphs, and intentional spacing that helps readers quickly navigate and scan information.
Strategic content aligns messaging with user intent, creating a journey from question to answer. Every webpage should guide users to fulfill a specific need, whether that is exploring options, learning about a process, finding answers, or taking action. This means understanding your audience and their goals, so you can structure content in a way that leads naturally toward those goals.
Editing is how good content becomes great. Effective editing ensures consistency in tone, clarity of message, and alignment with brand voice. When you refine ideas, remove redundancy, and choose precise language, editing can also improve accessibility and readability of your webpages.
Well-edited content signals professionalism and care, which directly impacts how users perceive your organization.
As AI-driven search continues to reshape how people find and consume information, clear, structured content is more important than ever. Search engines that used to heavily focus on keywords, now prioritize content that is well-organized, easy to interpret, and directly responsive to user intent.
This means your content needs to work for both human readers and the machines that summarize it. Writing with clarity, structure, and purpose ensures your content remains visible, valuable, and competitive in an evolving digital landscape.