House Style Guide

After you submit a new product or update an existing one, our editors will do a quick edit of the copy to ensure it complies with the EBOSS House Style. To speed up the publishing of your products, keep your copy consistent with the following:

Consider the Audience

EBOSS is directed to architects, specifiers, and builders, not homeowners or consumers. A product listing should provide robust technical information, so it's important to keep the language factual.

• Avoid superlatives and hyperboles ('the best', 'breathtaking', 'limitless')
• Keep the tone professional — not conversational, or advertorial. Leave out questions, exclamations, and idioms
• While aesthetics, and mood can be important, don't allow flowery descriptions to overwhelm the information
• Keep it simple and succinct

Write in the Third Person

EBOSS contains a lot of content from different brands. To avoid confusion we only accept copy written in the third person — i.e. not using personal terms like 'our' and 'we'. Instead of writing 'We supply our customers with X,' write 'Company Y supplies its customers with X'.

Use high-resolution images

Architects are visual people so a poor image will discourage them from looking at your product listing.

No Copyrights ©, Registration ® Signs and Trademarks ™

Like most publications, we remove these from brand names and product names as they impair readability and give articles and product pages a cold, legal feel.

Avoid Uppercase in Proper Nouns unless an Acronym

We are reluctant to publish uppercase in brand and product names unless the name is an acronym, as uppercase is demonstrated to be difficult to read, causing rivers in text and comes across as 'yelling'.  We review each request for uppercase based on whether the word is an acronym or there is demonstrated consistency across the web in how the company presents the brand.

Don't Use Unqualified Superlative Statements

Any sentence that says a company/product is "the best", "the only", "the superior" or "the leading" is unqualified and not helpful to architects wanting honest, evidence-based information on a product's performance.  We reword these to a neutral statement or remove them entirely.

Other Semantic House Styles

• Change all first person pronouns to third person 
• Use the standard UK spelling (colour, specialise, metres, matt)
• Give full measurements e.g. '600 x 600mm' not '600 x 600', with no leave a space between the number and the measurement e.g. '100mm' and not '100 mm'. Measurements are generally given in millimetres (mm) or metres (m), not centimetres (cm)
• Avoid '&' in text, unless in bullet points
• Dashes to be "em dashes" e.g. '—' not hyphens '-'
• Use a single space after a full stop, no exclamation marks