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Visual presentation is everything to an article. Visual presentation is one of the first things that you see in an article, and the way an article looks upon first glance will influence how you view the article. A lot of that is in the theming. Starting with the Just Girly Things Theme gives a dramatically different impression from starting with the Ad Astra Theme, and you can't just paste one theme into another article.

But what I really want to talk about is everything else: all of the other formatting a user might use. CSS, divs and special formatting can be used to direct the flow of an article, and control how a reader approaches a page. Some divs get parsed as important, meaning the reader pays more attention to them. Others get parsed as unimportant, easily skipped.

Consider, for instance, the Special Containment Procedures of any article. Normally, you’re going to skip this, because everyone always does. But if you place a custom div into the Containment Procedures, and put the rest of the article into a collapsible, you've made a visual appearance that will hook the readers in and get them to read the Con Procs for once.

But, at the same time, you want to be careful: if you format your Containment Procedures up too much, or in the wrong way, it'll look like one of the security clearance headers that appear on articles like SCP-2000 or SCP-3201 – which are not important to the article itself, and are more likely to be skipped.

You can also use formatting as a visual shortcut, to effectively abbreviate or denote certain content for when it is read. Think about the visual context text messages give – color and side are different. You can color code content to mark who is speaking, and help your reader keep track of who is who, even when it is not a text message.