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, ICT recommends using the institutional Web Content Management System (WCMS). If you use a web-authoring tool to create your individual webpages‚ ICT recommends the DreamWeaver tool. ICT 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 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
- See how your webpages work without graphics or javascript. Some people use a text only browser like Lynx‚ or use graphic browsers with images or javascript turned off. If you test your pages using Lynx‚ then you will know how your pages will appear to these people.
- 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).
- 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
- The W3C has several tools for checking web pages, including an HTML Validator and a CSS Validator.
- 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 on 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 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 can uncover issues that search engines will have indexing your site‚ and may also show problems that people with disabilities may have with your site.
- Test your site for usability and accessibility.
Minimize Site Maintenance and Revision Time
- Using the institutional Web Content Management Service (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.
- If you can't use our Web Content Management Service, then use PHP 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 place‚ instead of in every file on your website. You can learn about PHP on the PHP web site.
- 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.
