I just embedded one of my topics from Meta into another forum, here is hot it looks like:
While the original is very well structured and has multiple leve headings, the one-boxed version is really hard to read.
The experience can be easily improved by adding some punctuation in a one-boxed version:
- Add a “dot” after headings which don’t have dots at the end, except if a list follows it.
- Add a
•
htmlentity on the beginning on every list item. - Add a “dot” after the end of the list, if there is no punctuation at the end of it already (comma, dot, ; etc)
- In the excerpt being displayed in a one-box, identify the highest level of heading, if any (H1, H2 etc, which ever is the highest one), and make only those headings bold.
The fixed version would look like this:
Personal Page badge • Created a topic in a particular category • Wrote at least 1000 words in the topic (in one or multiple messages) • Wrote in the topic at least 10 days (non-consecutive) • Uploaded at least 10 images. Goal. In our forum, we have a category named “farms”. Goat farmers, small to big, are welcome to create their own topic/page there to tell about their farm, upload photos, push news and answer questions …
Just 4 simple tricks should improve readability greatly.