The University of Vermont

World Wide Web Project Practices and Policies

This list is now "official policy," since the UVM web project is now "official" university business. The webmasters were charged with the process of developing a web policy for UVM. This document accurately describes the webmasters' group politik on the matter of UVM web pages.

1. The top level of pages under the direct control of the webmasters are assumed to be a public doorway to prospective students, the current UVM community, and the public. As such, they are scrutinized for content much as any printed brochure or catalog published by the university.

2. The webmasters provide links from the pages under their direct control to pages developed by academic departments and organizational entities on campus. These "sub-links" are maintained by the organization or department with consultation and advice from the webmasters. Accuracy and timeliness of the information is the responsibility of the department.

3. Links are provided to academic departments and organizational entity pages only after the webmasters verify that there is a person responsible for maintaining the page(s). To have a hypertext link added from the existing web of pages to your departmental or organizational pages, send mail to webmaster@uvm.edu. Please consider an appropriate location and context within the existing web when making your request. In may be appropriate to have your pages referenced from several pages within the existing web. Keep in mind that not all existing pages are under the control of the webmaster.
   
4. There are no links to commercial, political, or special interest organizations at the top level.
   
5. Departmental and Organizational accounts ­- including student groups and clubs -- are available from CIT, as described in the document Department and Organization Host Accounts. This document includes a description of the account policies as well as an application form which may be e-mailed back to Ellen Nims for processing.
   
6. Links to personal home pages are at the discretion of the individual academic departments. We don't provide central links to personal pages.
   
7. We do encourage the development of personal pages by our faculty, staff, and student., and provide instructions how to create them on their own university unix shell account. All users of University of Vermont computing facilities for WWW publishing are bound by the blanket Computing and Information Technology (CIT) Computer Account Usage Policy.
   
8. Student and faculty accounts are usually limited to 3 megabytes of data. This would be any combination of web stuff and whatever other material the user has in the normal course of their work or studies.

9. There is no enforced standard for the look and feel of the pages; however, you may wish to consider these notes on style and design from the University of Indiana, Bloomington.
   
10. Everyone wants to use little balls and similar graphic elements in their page designs. A complete library of graphic elements is maintained by the webmasters: there is no need to make yet another copy of "greenball.gif" in your directory. Simply reference the appropriate image using HTML code similar to the following:
    
    <img src=http://www.uvm.edu/icon/balls/greenball.gif>

11. Everyone wants to know who is looking at their pages and how often. The www.uvm.edu server does not accumulate usage statistics. If you absolutely must know how popular your pages are, we have made a counter image available for UVM web page use only.
    
12. Everyone wants their pages to be found by the UVM Search Engine. This shouldn't be a problem: chances are, the Search Engine will find them, unless you take steps to hide them (see below). You can still help the Search Engine by following these hints for web indexing.
    
13. Not everyone wants to hide their pages from users, but you can if you want. Pages and directories on www.uvm.edu can be hidden from specific machines or entire groups of machines, such as all off-campus users. Pages may also be protected via username/password combinations. For details, see How can I set up access restrictions for my WWW documents? Pages can be hidden from the UVM Search Engine (and others) by following the Standard for Robot Exclusion.
    
14. A UVM newsgroup exists to discuss issues related to technical issues and the practice and theory of the WWW. This newsgroup is located at news:uvm.websters.

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