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University Communications and Marketing 
Web Platforms and Documentation

Heading Block

Heading blocks help you provide structure and pacing within a post. This structure helps users digest a story as they read through it while also providing a means for pacing.

Overview

Headings help break up longer stories into smaller pieces. They also help the reader understand what will be discussed within the next section of the story.

While a simple bolded line can visually function as a heading, it is recommended that the heading block be used for accessibility and SEO purposes.

Web pages have six “levels” of headings. Correct usage of the heading levels is important for the following reasons:

  • They help create an outline of content that screen reader users leverage to navigate through a web page.
  • They help provide semantic meaning to your web page so that search engines can better crawl your site’s content. The better a search engine can understand your content, the higher you are likely to appear in search results.
  • Assuming all content maintainers of a site are using headings correctly, they help create a consistent look-and-feel as users navigate through your site.

Using Heading Levels Correctly

There are only a few things that you need to remember to use heading levels correctly.

First and foremost, don’t skip over levels. Headings should be used in numerical sequential order. It is web convention for a web post’s title to be heading level one (H1), and there should generally only be one H1 on each web page.

That means that all of the headings that appear within the body of your web post should be H2 or lower. In fact, NC State Stories is coded so that you can’t insert an H1 within the body of a post.

Using Lead Lines and Separators

If you are using NC State Stories’ Enhanced Add-on and the immersive post template that comes with it, there are a couple of additional options that can help with sectioning of your content.

There is the option to format a lead line of a paragraph. This will make the first line of the paragraph that it is applied to be all uppercase and bolded. This provides an additional signal to the reader that they are entering a new section of a story.

The immersive template also has a separator block. This block simply adds a short horizontal line that acts as a more noticeable delimiter between sections of a story.

Both of these features can be used alongside headings within your story.

Need help?

Have questions? Feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns at go.ncsu.edu/ucomm-dev-request.