The following information provides you with general guidelines for developing webpages. There are also guidelines specific to departmental pages and individual pages. Webpages must adhere to the Computer Use Policy and University of Saskatchewan policies.
Keep the following points in mind when designing and maintaining your site:
If developing a site for your academic or administrative unit, ITS recommends using the institutional Web Content Management System (WCMS). If you use a web-authoring tool to create your individual webpages‚ ITS recommends the DreamWeaver tool. ITS offers training for DreamWeaver.
Make Your Site Easy to Use
- Remember to put an "index.extension (e.g. php‚ html‚ shtml) page in each directory you create. Otherwise‚ people may connect to your website and get a raw directory listing or error message instead of your starting page for that website.
- Keep the starting page as short as possible. Break your site into a number of smaller pages that will be easier for your visitors to read.
- Provide a consistent way to navigate through your site so that visitors will always know where they are.
- Remember that webpages are not the same as text. Designing for a webpage is more complex than just saving a word processing document as an HTML file. There are different design considerations.
- Place a link back to your starting page‚ the University homepage‚ etc. on every webpage in your site. Remember that people often come to your site through a search engine‚ bookmark or link. They will not always come through your "front door."
- Keep graphics file sizes small. Something that loads quickly on a machine on campus could take several minutes to load on a machine using telephone connections. Is the picture really worth the extra wait time?
- Be careful with background colours or background images. Contrast is important for readability online and for when the content is printed with a black and white printer.
- Remember to support people with disabilities. Failure to do this could result in legal action against the University if people with disabilities are unable to access resources available to others. For help on making websites accessible view the online course on accessibility.
- Provide a way for visitors to your site to contact you. This could be so visitors can contact you for more information or to report errors‚ such as bad links‚ on your website.
Keep Your Website Current and Accurate
- Routinely check your website for links that no longer work and fix these links. On www.usask.ca you can use the WebXRef program for this purpose.
- Routinely check the content on your website for accuracy. Remove any outdated information and add new information as appropriate.
- Provide a way for visitors to your site to report problems with outdated information‚ bad links‚ etc. Their comments will do a lot to help you improve the website.
Check Your Website for Errors
- Use the Lynx program to see how your webpages operate without graphics. Many people use a text only browser like Lynx‚ or use graphic browsers with the images turned off to increase speed over slow modems. If you test your pages using Lynx‚ then you will know how your pages will appear to these people. Also‚ Lynx will notify you if there is any "bad html" in the file that should be corrected.
- Website developers on www.usask.ca can login interactively and run Lynx from the command-line, (e.g. www% lynx http://www.usask.ca/its).
- Lynx is not available on homepage.usask.ca. Website developers on Homepage can use Betsie. In the location bar of your web browser‚ type in http://www.usask.ca/cgi-bin/betsie.pl/ with the URL of your site added after the final slash (e.g. http://www.usask.ca/cgi-bin/betsie.pl/www.usask.ca/its/).
- Check your site with the graphics turned off. In Firefox‚ you can turn off graphics under: Preferences / Content / Load Images
- Checking your site with the JavaScript turned off on your browser will also help to ensure that visitors will be able to visit your website without problems. In Firefox‚ you can turn off JavaScript under: Preferences / Content / Enable JavaScript
- Bobby is a useful site that analyzes your webpage and notifies you of any problems on the page related to accessibility by people with disabilities. It will also check that your webpage conforms to specific versions of the HTML standard.
- Netmechanic provides several free tools for checking for bad links‚ checking HTML tags‚ checking browser compatibility‚ etc.
- WebXRef is a program available on www.usask.ca for checking bad links on webpages hosted by www.usask.ca. Use it periodically to check your website.
Assist People Who Link to Your Site
- Keep the file name for published pages the same. Changing the name will break all links‚ bookmarks and search engines that point to the old file name. For example‚ if you revise your site‚ do not change the file "staff.php" to "staff_list.php" because this will break the links for everything that points to "staff.php".
- If you do change the location of a file‚ replace the old file with a "tombstone" page that says "This file has moved to here." Better yet‚ use the features of your web server to automatically redirect people to the new page. (On Apache web servers, this is done using the "RedirectPermanent" directive in the .htaccess file.)
- Periodical information like newsletters should have a permanent non-changing name to access the information. For example, consider the University Calendar. Departments all over campus link to their program information within the calendar. If the calendar name changed each year to something like 2005_calendar‚ then 2006_calendar‚ then every department would have to change all their links each year. This could result in departments pointing to outdated information in older calendars. It is much better to put the current information in a directory called "current_calendar" that always refers to the most recent information.
Test Your Site
- Test your site with a variety of web browsers‚ in a variety of configurations. Make sure it works on black and white monitors‚ smaller screens‚ different manufacturer’s browsers‚ etc.
- Test your site on different operating systems‚ including both Windows and Macintosh systems.
- Test your web browser using the Lynx text-only web browser. This will show any difficulties that search engine indexing programs will have indexing your site‚ and will also show problems that people with disabilities may have using your site.
- Test your site for usability and accessibility.
Minimize Site Maintenance and Revision Time
- Using the institutional Web Content Management System (WCMS) can greatly reduce the effort spent on maintaining your academic or administrative unit’s site. Request a demo or training for the WCMS.
- Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) whenever possible to control the appearance of the pages on your website. That way you can make major changes to the appearance of your website by changing only one file. You can learn about cascading style sheets in the CSS online course.
- Use Server Side Includes to include common content (like menu bars) on all the pages of your site. That way you only have to change the content in one file‚ instead of in every file on your website. You can learn about Server Side Includes in the SSI online course.
- Develop a regular maintenance schedule and use automated tools to check for bad links‚ find html coding errors‚ etc.
- Have statistics generated for your site‚ and analyze these statistics regularly to determine if there are any problems on your site.
