Websites are electronic publications and present an image of UTB/TSC to the world. Web contributors and developers must follow good practices to maintain the university’s identity and brand. It is important to keep page designs simple for easy navigation and to maintain consistency, readability and usability. All official departmental websites must be located on the UTB/TSC web server.
Maintenance/Ownership
Each department should develop and follow a maintenance schedule to periodically update sites and check links. Web pages must have current accurate information, be grammatically correct and free of spelling errors. Web pages should be maintained in a timely manner; outdated pages should be removed.
Develop a site map
Decide what the main navigation will be and how you may want to arrange it.
Content
Remember your target audience. Text should be concise and kept to a minimum when possible. Write to the audience for which it is intended. Use bulleted lists to break up text. Use terminology in headers, subheads, photo names and text carefully. This will get your pages attached to more search engines, resulting in increased visibility for your website. When adding links to other web pages, check for accuracy. Use graphic elements such as photos, graphics or pull quotes to break large areas of text. Your most important information should be “above the fold” on the first screen. To avoid long pages, lengthy text should be divided through linked documents such as .pdf file or separate .html pages.
Images
Use .jpg format for photographs; use .gif format for graphics. Images should be set to a 72 DPI resolution. When using photographs modified in Adobe Photoshop, use the “save for web” feature to reduce your file size as much as possible.
Fonts
The UTB/TSC website uses sans serif fonts that are clean and easy to read for its text. Acceptable fonts are Arial, Arial Black and Verdana.
Colors
See the colors entry in this guide for proper use of university colors. Use the color black for your text.
Use of copyrighted materials
Written permission needs to be obtained for use of copyrighted materials with the clear understanding on the part of