Pages Where Every Other Sentence Is Bold

A page that shouts

Every sentence on a business website matters to the person who wrote it. So when the owner edits a page, the important parts get bold.

Then a few go red, because bold no longer stood out. One line gets underlined, another goes into capitals, and the opening hours grow two sizes larger.

A year later half the page is emphasised in one way or another. It looks like a flyer stapled to a pole, and it reads like one: loud, and hard to take in.

The owner's intention was the opposite. They wanted the important things noticed.

How emphasis piles up

• The bold button sits right there in the editor, one click away.
• Each new notice is added in bold, and old ones are never removed.
• Text pasted from a flyer or a document keeps its colours and underlines.
• Underlining for emphasis is a habit carried over from typed letters.
• Capitals and red come out when bold stops working.
• Several people edit the site, each emphasising what matters to them.

The second is how most pages get there. Nobody decides to make half the text bold; it happens one urgent notice at a time, and nothing is ever demoted.

Why nothing stands out

Emphasis works by contrast. A bold line catches the eye because the lines around it are not bold.

When every other sentence is bold, the eye has nothing to rank. Readers skim the whole page at the same pace and miss the one line that really mattered.

The look costs something too. A page full of bold, red and capitals resembles an advertisement, and visitors read advertisements with more suspicion than plain information.

Underlines that lead nowhere

Online, underlining means a link. Visitors have learned that over twenty years, and they act on it.

An underlined phrase that is only emphasis gets clicked, or tapped on a phone, and nothing happens. The visitor assumes the link is broken, which is worse than no underline at all.

It also blurs the real links. If some underlines go somewhere and some do not, people stop trusting any of them.

Red, capitals and size

Red reads as a warning or an error. Used for ordinary information, it makes a page feel anxious, and some readers with colour blindness cannot tell it from black.

Whole sentences in capitals are slower to read, because words lose the shapes that make them recognisable at a glance.

And text made larger to stand out competes with the headings, so the page no longer shows which is which.

A worked example

An audiovisual rental company with a warehouse unit and two vans rents sound systems, microphones and projectors for weddings, corporate meetings and community festivals.

Its rental terms page had grown over six years. Deposits, damage, delivery windows, late returns, setup fees and cancellations were each in bold, most in red, several underlined and two in capitals.

Customers kept saying they had never seen the cancellation rule: deposits refunded only with fourteen days' notice.

It was there, in bold red, between a line about accepted cards and a line about parking at the warehouse. When every line is emphasised, the rule that costs money looks exactly like the rule about parking.

The page was rewritten under headings for booking, delivery, deposits, damage and cancellation, in plain text. One shaded box at the top now holds the two rules that cost customers money: the cancellation window and the booking deadline for weekends.

The quote form repeats the cancellation rule beside the button, so it is seen at the moment it applies.

What screen readers hear

Most screen readers do not announce bold, colour or underlining by default. To someone listening, the shouting page and a plain one sound the same.

So if a condition matters, the words have to say so. Styling can support that sentence, but it cannot carry the meaning alone.

Bold lines used as headings are a related problem. They look like headings, but screen readers and search engines see ordinary paragraphs, and nobody can jump between sections.

Let headings do the structure

Most of what owners make bold is really structure: this part is about delivery, that part is about prices.

Real headings do that job. In most editors they sit in a drop-down labelled Paragraph, as Heading 2 and Heading 3, and the theme styles them the same way on every page.

With headings, short paragraphs and the occasional list, a page becomes easy to scan without a single bold sentence.

Choosing the one or two things

On each page, ask which single fact costs a customer most if they miss it: a booking deadline, an emergency number, a condition that causes disputes.

Give that, and perhaps one more, the emphasis, written as a full sentence. Everything else goes back to plain text.

A useful test is to remove the bold from a line and ask whether anyone would lose money, time or a booking by missing it. If not, it stays plain.

Keeping it from creeping back

Ask whoever maintains the site to style one kind of notice box, so the important line looks the same wherever it appears.

Paste text as plain text, so colours and underlines from documents do not come with it. And when a new notice goes up, take an old one down.

The counter-case

Some bold is useful. A key term in a long explanation, the short labels in a list, or a temporary notice about a closure all earn it.

Terms and conditions also need certain rules to be easy to find, and that is a case for clear headings and plain wording rather than more emphasis.

The aim is not a page without emphasis. It is a page where emphasis is rare enough to mean something: one or two things per page, headings for the rest.

On the next edit

1. Count the bold lines on your busiest page.
2. Name the one fact customers must not miss.
3. Turn bold labels into real headings.
4. Remove underlines from anything that is not a link.
5. Return red and capitals to plain text.
6. Style one notice box for that fact.
7. Paste new text as plain text.

Step two is the decision that makes the rest easy. Once the one fact that matters is named, every other line can lose its bold without anyone worrying about what might be missed.

Keeping type consistent beyond the website, on quotes and letters, is covered in quotes and invoices in whatever font Word picks.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.