The Case for Sentence Case

Look, feel, and flow

In Develop a Web Style Guide for Your Company I recommend using title case for page titles and sentence case for headings and subheadings within pages. If you are not sure about following that guidance, here I will make a reasoned case why you should.

Look

It looks good. Sentence case headings and subheadings create a more readable, attractive appearance on the page compared to title case, which can look cluttered.

Use sentence case for headings and subheadings. Sentence case is easier to read.

—Content Design London

Feel

It feels conversational and connected. Sentence case creates a friendly, human tone that builds connection with readers, especially younger audiences, and avoids the formal, distant feel of title case.

Sentence case aligns with how people speak and read naturally … It feels more approachable and conversational, which matches the tone we want to set for our audience (paraphrased from their reasoning on user demographics and testing) … We found sentence case reduces mental load and makes headings feel more like natural language.

—USAGov

Flow

It interrupts the flow of the page content just enough to make the headings scannable on first glance, but makes the headings feel connected to what follows. Title case was long the default in Google Ads to grab attention like a burr grabs your sock, but recent performance data shows sentence case delivers better results and avoids the ugly, jagged look that disrupts reader flow—exactly the experience we want to spare our customers.

Sentence case reduces visual clutter, especially in longer headings or subheadings … It allows the eye to flow smoothly down the page while still providing clear hierarchy and scannability … Title case can make longer phrases feel jagged and interrupt the natural reading flow, whereas sentence case keeps everything connected to the body text that follows.

—Chad Coleman

Large-scale studies like Ad Strength and Creative Study: Data and Learnings From 1M+ Ads have found that sentence case actually outperforms title case in key metrics like ROAS (return on ad spend) and CPA (cost per acquisition), especially for responsive search ads.

Or as they would say on Schoolhouse Rocks in some bizarre AI world

Title case for page titles

The goal of making style-guide rules for your writing and web content especially is consistency. Print content generally has a life of its own where web content has a life with many peers. Something you create on your website today sits next to something you made last year and will be joined new content all the time. Following a set of rules will ensure a consistent user experience across content from different years and different writers.

Using title case for page titles says to your website readers that this is something special. This is first and foremost among the content on this page.

References

These are the articles that I quote or reference in this post.

Develop a Web Style Guide for Your Company

Add a style guide that is unique to your online writing

By now, you must have checked out my article Develop a Writing Style Guide for Your Company. Now you are ready for this companion article. Just as writing for print has specific considerations—postal conventions, brevity in the case of billboards, etc.)—writing online adds usability, interaction (UX), search-engine optimization (SEO), and semantic organization principles.

Resources for writing online

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bold, underline, italic

Use bold sparingly. The less you use it, the more powerful each instance of it is. If more than 10% of your page is bold, you have too much bold. Use HTML headings for headings not bold.

Never underline text. Underlining should be an indication of a clickable link. If you underline other text, readers will expect to be able to click it and think your site is broken if they can’t.

Follow your style guide for use of italics and be consistent.

headings

HTML makes several levels of headings available to us. We use them to make our pages easy to scan. A typical page uses heading like this:

One Heading 1 <h1> per page. This is generated by the page title in the WordPress database. Use title case for your page titles (capitalize each major word).

A few Heading 2’s <h2> that break the page down into its main content areas. Use sentence case (capitalize first word and proper nouns).

Within each <h2>, we use Headings 3 and 4 to break that content down further. <h3> and <h4> can be adjusted to look larger or smaller using Bootstrap. I add Bootstrap to all my work. It gives me many options for adjusting the look of content without having to write specific CSS to style elements. Continue to use sentence case for all subheadings.

What is Bootstrap?

Bootstrap is a free tool that helps us make websites look professional and work smoothly across phones, tablets, and computers—automatically.

Its ready-made design pieces let content writers and editors quickly update text, images, or layouts in their site editor without learning CSS or adding additional styles to stay mobile-friendly.

line breaks

Do not force line breaks. Modern websites are responsive and people view pages on many sizes of devices from mobile phones to tablets to laptop screens and even large, curved gaming monitors. You may be tempted to force a line break you think looks great on the screen you are editing it with but can easily look like a mistake on other screen sizes.

Often you don’t want a product name or company name to break in the middle. A fix that doesn’t force a line break, but will keep those words on the same line is to add a non-breaking space between the words. Find your text in the CODE view of the WordPress classic editor (or view HTML in the WordPress block editor or other CMS) and replace the spaces between the words you want to keep together with &nbsp;.

Correct

    • links should be descriptive of what comes next and use words that match the title of the destination page
    • and open in a new window when there is no navigation on the page to be opened, examples:
      • PDFs/images
      • external websites
      • slideshows or videos

Incorrect

    • links should not be placed in the middle of a paragraph (there are exceptions where it makes sense, but as a rule, put your link on its own line)
    • or show the https://
    • or simply say “click here,” “here,” or “more”

Think of your website users as being there for the first time or being there for the thousandth time. Make it easy for first timers to scan the page for important links. Make it easy for the person using your website regularly to always be able to find links at the start of a new line. Links in the middle of paragraphs break up readability of the paragraph and move all over as screen and window sizes change.

should indicate that they are email links

Correct

Email

Contact Terrence Bogie at

Incorrect

Email Bogie

Terrence Bogie

when printed, the email address is lost

I can develop a technique for you to provide email links on your website that look like the real email address and launch a new email when clicked, but don’t appear as email links to bots. For example, .

Read more about how to avoid spam emails

links to PDFs

PDFs are so 1990s. Add the content to a web page rather than upload a PDF file. The website is accessible by default, where the process of making a PDF accessible is time consuming and/or expensive. If you have to link to one, you should make it accessible, indicate the link is to a PDF, and tell how large the file is.

Correct

Inver Grove Brewing Menu January 2026 PDF, 514 KB

Incorrect

Inver Grove Brewing Menu January 2026

Minneapolis-St. Paul vs. Twin Cities

For brevity and search engine purposes, use “Twin Cities” interspersed with “Minneapolis-St. Paul” on the web.

people in headlines

When writing a headline about someone’s accomplishment, use the person’s name in the headline. We want people searching for those names to find our pages. News sources love to obscure the subject of their articles to get you to click to find out who it was. That’s not what you want for your people. You want their names out there as much as possible.

Correct

Kirill Kaprizov receives Pavel Datsyuk Award for Excellence in Suprise Wristshots

Minnesota North Star Dino Ciccarelli received the Jim Mahon Memorial Trophy as highest scoring right winger in the OMJHL

Incorrect

Minnesota Wild wing receives Pavel Datsyuk Award for Excellence in Suprise Wristshots

Legendary North Star received the Jim Mahon Memorial Trophy as highest scoring right winger in the OMJHL

Madison Church Website Redesign

Luther Memorial Church in Madison, WI, was founded in 1907 as a mission for University of Wisconsin Lutheran students seeking English worship. By 1923, it moved to its Gothic Revival building at 1021 University Avenue. Today, this intergenerational congregation maintains traditions of classic liturgy, music, university ties, and community service.

The website was using the RealChurch WordPress theme, purchased in 2015. The theme was released in 2013. We talked about what was working in the current theme and possibilities in a redesign. We carried over the large hero image collection and top-of-page section navigation with dropdowns that the community was familiar with. 

Old design


Click to view old design
The stock theme had elements that fit some church needs but lacked flexibility.

The feel of the new design is lighter and brighter to allow for the often-darker colorful images from inside the church. The current events blocks are brought higher on the page and upcoming church services and musical performances have their video embedded directly on the homepage.

New design


Click to view new design
The new design delivers embedded video and more visually intense homepage content.

Ease of use

The visual redesign is a much smaller part of the improvement. The admin side of the WordPress configuration makes managing the site many times faster and more efficient. Everything is designed to handle Luther Memorial’s specific needs and there is an extensive documentation subsite that the web content manager can access once logged in.

Mobile responsiveness

The new theme is fully responsive and looks great on mobile devices.



Click to view old mobile design
The old design had a single, rudimentary mobile dropdown menu.


Click to view new mobile design
The new design has a responsive mobile menu.
Phone frame image by David Chivasa from Pixabay

Logo upgrades

As part of the project, I created new, vector versions of the church’s logos.

CAPSTONE Web Series

Mitchell Hamline led the way in online, distance education among ABA-approved law schools with its Hybrid J.D. offering in 2015. The distinguishing feature of its blended learning options a decade later continued to be the school’s unique CAPSTONE weeks—the on-campus portion of the program designed to deliver intensive learning in a compressed timeframe.

Creative Director Karl Peters worked with talented video storyteller Noah Ferche of Woodbridge Productions to capture an entire week in the life of students on video during CAPSTONE week.

What they brought to me was extraordinary. I knew it needed to be brought to life in a very special way. This didn’t belong as seven videos dumped on YouTube or pasted into basic web pages.


Click for more
The main page presents the content like a show page on a streaming service with each episode at the bottom.

I built a standalone website that would provide the streaming-service experience viewers are familiar with from their favorite shows.


Click for more
Each episode has a synopsis and can play on its own page.

This custom platform turned the CAPSTONE web series into a memorable experience and provided an impressive platform to deliver new introductions to the content: from red-carpet premiere viewings for the participants to a seven-day episode reveal to students already in the pipeline and email and landing page experiences for potential new students.

The project eventually won gold in the 2024 Digital Advertising Awards category: Special Video-Over 2 Minutes, Series.

The Changing Dynamics of SEO

As a dedicated digital marketing guy, I continuously seek to expand my knowledge and stay updated with the latest trends in the marketing landscape. I’m presently researching and analyzing the ways search-engine optimization (SEO) is evolving—with search no longer simply being about keywords, but searcher’s conversations with AI and the way AI seeks to provide answers by interpreting and summarizing website content and other available sources—from videos to social media to news media and online reviews—with content written to help formulate those answers or generative engine optimization (GEO).

That involves paying attention as the answers are coming back and going back after a chat session to look at the sources the engine used and analyzing why the sources were chosen and how they were used. Of course, optimizing your content for GEO does no good if everything happens in the AI chat and it only uses your site without naming you or providing a link. The goal is to demonstrate your expertise AND get credit for it. It’s a whole new world, but I approach it how I always approached SEO, thinking of the user on the other side of the query, not just the engine itself.

And yes, I get crabby with the robots sometimes.