CAS Computing Services
CAS Departmental Web Standard
In 2003 the College of Arts and Sciences established and publicized a standard for departmental web site construction and content. A subsequent round of training was presented by the UVM web team to our academic departments.
In 2009, the College revamped our departmental web standard to be more comprehensive and specific. At this point all academically oriented Arts and Sciences departments can choose from one of five templates as a starting point.
This standard applies to all CAS academic departments.
The intent of this standard is to provide a consistent structure for all our departments to work from, and to take advantage of an institution-wide method for web site construction (The UVM Web Publishing System) thereby ensuring a cohesive web image across the College and continuity as personnel change over time. Our primary goal is to provide quality content in a consistent, well branded manner across the entire College.
We feel that our standard is general enough to accommodate the vastly different disciplinary needs of all our departments. If you would like to comment on this standard, please feel free to contact CAS Computing Services with feedback.
The primary elements of the CAS standard are outlined by the menu items to the left, namely:
- Each department must designate a webmaster (and there are rules about what kind of affiliate this person can be).
- Each department web site must use the UVM web publishing system.
- Each department web site must use the approved website navigation.
- Each department web master will use Adobe Contribute as their web editing tool unless compelling reasons, and adequate support, exist for using something else.
Colors
All College websites will use the standard UVM web colors as defined by the approved templates.
Fonts
All College websites will use the standard UVM fonts as defined by the web publishing system. The good news is that if you're using the web publishing system all of the font decisions are already made for you. All you have to do is NOT use any <font></font> tags anywhere. The only formatting tags you should use, in fact, are the various standard Heading tags <h1></h1> etc. in order to allow those with visual handicaps to understand the organization of your site. For this reason, we also strongly advise against taking any content directly from Microsoft Office documents, either via export as HTML or via copy and paste. You should always save Word documents as DOS Text and open them in a simple text editor such as Notepad or Wordpad, before copying and pasting.
Background colors
You guessed it, we use the standard only and it's all taken care of by the template. You shouldn't have any color attributes set in your <body> tags anywhere. In fact don't bother with anything having to do with <head> or <body> since the web publishing system completely ignores those tags in favor of its own.
Graphics
Feel free to include appropriate images in the content area of your website as you see fit. We strongly urge you to make sure that your images have been properly resized to the proper resolution for viewing on the web, thus preventing long and annoying downloads of unnecessarily large image files.
You may also include a departmental logo or other graphic above your main menu item. Click here for more information on how to size and display such an image.
Last modified September 12 2012 03:29 PM