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University of Virginia Web Publishing Guidelines
Web Cluster Information for www.virginia.eduOperating System: UNIX
Communication BasicsAll University of Virginia Web pages must adhere to the guidelines set forth in the U.Va. Copyright/Disclaimer Statement and the U.Va. Privacy Notice. Each site's Home Page should display information about the office or unit and contact information (e.g. address, phone number, e-mail address, map location). Navigation should be vertical and located on the left side of the Home page and interior pages. Use of “flyout” navigation menus should be avoided due to accessibility concerns. Navigation on secondary pages should indicate the current page by designating that page's button/link as "off” or “active”. See our samples page for a suggested implementation.
Style and DesignThe University's red and blue bars serve as a seal of approval for U.Va. Web sites and are only allocated to home pages of sites that meet the guidelines outlined in this document. Interior pages within a unit site do not include a red or blue bar. Departments and administrative offices may contact the Web Communications Office to obtain a site in one of our template designs. Use of official U.Va. logos, fonts and colors requires written approval from either the University of Virginia Office of Web Communications or The Collegiate Licensing Company. Please email for permission. For information and examples of the official U.Va. logos, fonts and colors, refer to the Graphic Identity for the University Web site. Alterations of the official U.Va. trademarks (typography, color, shape, etc) are not permitted, without exception. For body/content text, the same font face should be used throughout the site. The University's preferred font family is Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, or another sans-serif font. The font size should be approximately 12 pixels. Preferred page layout dimensions are 850px fixed width, left-aligned. When printed, site pages must show all content legibly on commodity laser and inkjet printers. Print-optimized stylsheets are strongly recommended. Advertising is not permitted on any part of virginia.edu, including, but not limited to, company/vendor logos and acknowledgements. All University of Virginia Web pages must adhere to the University's Web Site Advertising Policy. Every page should contain a footer which follows the following model. Note the contact email address, copyright showing current year, and last modified time. Please see the samples page for a suggested implementation.
Building your SiteThe Web Communications Office must be consulted prior to beginning any new site project or making significant changes to an existing site on www.virginia.edu. Plans for using server-side scripting, databases, and “off-the-shelf” blog or CMS products (Wordpress, Joomla, etc.) will be reviewed for security and compatibility with the server environment. Each page within a site should have a unique and appropriate <title> tag and relevant META description. Documents should not be posted in proprietary, editable formats, such as MS Word, MS Powerpoint, MS Excel, etc. unless the file must remain editable to the end-user. Documents should be converted to HTML, web-optimized PDF, or Flashpaper. The site is required to display uniformly and correctly in the following popular browsers. Browsercam is one of several useful resources for browser-testing on a variety of platforms.
The site is expected to be “usable” (display all relevant navigation and content) in the following browsers:
URLs should not include spaces, capital letters or any additional special characters.
XML/XHTMLThe preferred HTML document type is XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Strict document types, such as XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 1.1 Strict, are required to contain valid markup. The WCO suggests that all code and markup be checked for syntax errors. Special characters should be entity-encoded. When creating ATOM/RSS and XML feeds and documents, it is important to validate these formats using a tool such as feed validator or RUWF to ensure they are well-formed. HTML content in these files should be escaped using CDATA notation. SecurityInformation about securing your web directories with password protection and/or Netbadge is available at the following sites: Server-side applications (PHP, Perl, etc.) are required to be hardened against HTTP attacks from SQL Injection, remote file inclusion exploits, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other common penetration techniques. If vulnerabilities are discovered in server-side scripting, blog/CMS software, or other application code, access to the application will be blocked immediately. Additionally, the sponsoring office or department may be responsible for costs associated with repairing the application and performing a security assessment. In order to prevent your site from being indexed by Google and other search engines, you may add a robots.txt file to the root directory or add META exclusion instructions. See Google's page for Webmasters for more details. AccessibilityAll sites are required to meet Section 508 guidelines for ADA accessibility and Priority 2 of the WCAG 1.0 specification. View the WCAG accessibility checklist for information on how to meet these criteria. A link to the Usablenet.com LIFT text version should included on every page in the footer. View our samples page for implementation instructions and additional information. When choosing text and background colors for new designs, use this contrast checking tool to make sure the contrast value meets W3C criteria. The minimum contrast value for text/background is *500* for content areas above the footer. The footer sections (copyright, last modified) will have a minimum contrast value of *300*. ALT tags on content images should be informative, grammatically correct, and properly formatted. Alt tags for spacer or design images and images that do not provide content should be empty (alt=” ”).
Flash UsageFlash animations are to be published in Flash 6 format, unless the movie uses Actionscript that requires it to be published to a higher version. Flash objects should be embedded in an HTML page using SWFobject. The page must contain non-flash content or download instructions for browsers without the plugin.
Video EncodingFor instructions pertaining to acceptable video encoding formats, please consult the following guide. (PDF, 68K)
For VendorsVendors must provide all available source files for the design and programming of each site upon completion of the project. These may include Photoshop (PSD), Fireworks (PNG), Flash (FLA), Dreamweaver templates (DWT), and uncompiled source code. Vendors failing to provide full source materials may be assessed a penalty. Additional InformationThe University of Virginia has no editorial responsibility or control over certain Web pages, including but not limited to the Web pages of individual faculty members or students and the Web pages of student organizations and other organizations not formally a part of the University. Although the University encourages compliance with all University policies and practices at such Web sites, the University serves only as a neutral provider of Internet-related services to them.
How to Get HelpFor questions regarding server technology and publishing pages on the www.virginia.edu web cluster, including training opportunities for contributors, please contact the ITC Web Development Consult group. To obtain approval for a new web project, or to inquire about receiving assistance for an existing site, please contact the Web Communications Office. |
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| Last Modified: 08-Nov-2007 11:20:27 EDT |
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