Minnesota Department of Transportation

511 Travel Info

Design System

Web update style checklist

If you're creating or updating content on the MnDOT website, check your text against this checklist before publishing it. This list doesn’t represent every element of prescribed style for content on the MnDOT website, but it covers 10 of the most common issues. Taking a look at your text with these rules in mind will help you provide our audience with clear, easy-to-follow information.

And you should also take a look at the supplemental checklist below for common non-style procedural issues with updates.

Find more complete exploration of MnDOT web style in the rest of our design system section.

  1. Spelling and typos- Are there any in your content? It never hurts to paste the content into Word and see if it picks anything up.
  2. Sentence length- Are your sentences shorter than 26 words long? For the kind of web communication we do here, short and direct is almost always better. On a related note, you should make sure that your language use is as plain as possible.
  3. Numbers- Numbers between zero and nine, inclusively, should be written as words. From 10 up to one million, use digits. Above one million, use digits to express the number in millions. (One hot dog; 15 bags of chips; 2.3 million pounds of potatoes.)

    Exceptions:
    • If numbers above and below 10 are used in a single sentence, it’s acceptable to use figures for all of them. (The bill received 27 yes votes and 15 no votes, while 3 people abstained.)
    • If numbers are used as a measurement, use figures even if the numbers are under 10. (Toll rose by 5 percent; 2 miles) 
  4. Addresses and road names
    • If you're mentioning city names, take a look at our extensive MnDOT guide on how to present them on the web.
    • Abbreviate street titles and include a period (Ave., Blvd., Rd., St.)
    • If you’re mentioning a highway by name, you can use “Hwy” as the start of its name (Hwy 28 runs through Morris.) For US highways, refer to them as “US Hwy [number]” if there are both US and Minnesota highways sharing the same number, such as Hwy 61. If you’re talking about a highway without naming it, just use “highway.” (The car was abandoned next to the highway.)
    • Abbreviate cardinal directions and include a period (200 W. Fifth Ave.)
    • Spell out numbers below 10 when used as street names (W. Eighth St.); use numerals for numbers for 10 and above (W. 23rd St.)
    • Do not use superscript for ordinal numbers in addresses (108 10th St., not 108 10th St., and note that word processors will often try to impose this on you automatically)
    • Always use numerals for an address number (9 Vista Blvd.; 111 Johnson Pl.)
    • If you're talking about the intersection between two highways, name them both: Hwy 61 and Hwy 46. If possible, try to find the most graceful way to phrase it: “…where Hwy 61 meets Hwy 46” or “…Hwy 61 at Hwy 46” might be good options, for instance. 
  5. Times- Lowercase and punctuate a.m. and p.m., and make sure they’re separated from the time numeral by a space. If the time is on the hour, do not add “:00” or “o’clock.” Noon and midnight are preferable to 12 p.m. or 12 a.m., but whichever way you go, be consistent on the page.
  6. Commas- Following AP style, don’t use a serial comma before the last item of a list unless not doing so would make the sentence unclear. (The inspector looked at the bridge’s piers, deck and railings.) 
  7. Active voice – Write active sentences! People and organizations do things; they don’t happen by themselves. Say “MnDOT gave the award” instead of “the award was given.” The other way to think about this is that except in very specific cases, you should avoid passive voice.
  8. Capitalization- Reserve it for proper names: people, official offices, organizations, projects, etc. Webpage headings should follow headline format, capitalizing only the first word and proper nouns. (Sound wall project updates, not Sound Wall Project Updates )
    • Job titles- if they appear before names, uppercase; lowercase if they appear after (Deputy Director Johnson but then Johnson, deputy director)
  9. Acronyms- Try not to use them at all! But if you have to, don’t throw them at the reader without first establishing what they mean. For instance: “the crosswalk is equipped with accessible pedestrian signals (APS). Pedestrians find APS useful because…”

    This doesn’t apply in the relatively rare cases — like NASA or the NBA — where an acronym is in such widespread use that it’s reasonable to think that everyone would recognize it. When in doubt, err on the side of spelling it out; just because an acronym is familiar to you doesn’t mean that everyone (even within MnDOT!) knows it on sight.
  10. Lists- Capitalize the first word of each item in a bulleted list. Don’t use punctuation at the end, unless it’s a complete sentence.

Supplemental procedural checklist

While you’re looking at your content to make sure everything mentioned on the above checklist is OK, it’s a good idea to check for these common procedural mistakes with web updates:

  1. Alt text in images- Do your images have helpful alt text? They should! Alt text helps people with impaired vision who use screen readers. Having good alt text is also helpful for a site’s search engine optimization (SEO) performance. Here’s a good guide to alt text.
  2. Link formatting- Take a look at the paths of the links in your content:
    • For links within the MnDOT website, make sure they’re set up as relative links (basically, leaving out the "https://www.dot.state.mn.us" at the start of the path).
    • For external links, make sure the path starts with https instead of http (there are rare cases where only http will work, but not many; you can always try both in separate browser tabs to make sure). Https links are more secure than http.
    • If you copied text out of an email, make sure that Outlook didn’t change the URL drastically to make it a “safe link.” To get a clean version of the URL, you can always click the link in Outlook and then copy the address out your browser.
    • If information exists on the MnDOT website (or any other State of Minnesota website), link to it there instead of out to an external site.
    • We have a great deal of detailed guidance about links on the MnDOT Design System website.
  3. Document links- If your content includes a document that you need to link to, don’t post the document to MnDOT’s web server. Instead, upload it to eDOCS and link to it there. This will make file and website maintenance a lot easier over the long run.