Web Content Guidelines -- FCPS School Webmasters

NOTE: This document is being developed on an ongoing basis. If you have suggestions for additional areas to be covered, please email them to the DTRT for Instructional Websites. 

These web guidelines have been developed to help school webmasters design, maintain, and enhance their sites.

Purpose:  A school website is intended to communicate school-related information to parents, students and the community-at-large. While the website should be attractive and interesting, its main purpose is that of communication and, therefore, must be easy to navigate and contain up-to-date information. 

Content you should have on your school website:

• Contact information: school name and address, phone numbers, contact people.
• E-Mail address (hyperlinked) of the school webmaster

• Calendar of events

• List of staff members with (hyperlinked) e-mail addresses and phone numbers  

• Hyperlinks to class web pages for each teacher -- All teacher web pages are located on http://staff.fcps.net. Do not link to a teacher's website which is housed on a server other than http://staff.fcps.net.

(The school webmaster should notify Maggie Whittington at maggie.whittington@fayette.kyschools.us if the school web page which contains the links to classroom websites changes.)  

• Supply Lists for each class, linked prominently from home page.

• How to set up parent conference dates & times (as appropriate)  

• Hyperlink to school breakfast and lunch menus  

(Go to http://webapps.fcps.net/food/view/default.asp to select the breakfast and lunch menus links for your school.)

• School background and history, academic programs, mission statement, belief statements, and so forth  

• School council members, committee members and meeting information  

• PTA information  

• Hyperlink to your school's CATS report card and other accountability and assessment documents (on the district site or KDE site)  

• School newsletter and/or news page  

• School policies  

• Include the following disclaimer on your home page or at the bottom of every page on your site: 

Contents of this web site are intended to be used for the enhancement of instruction only.

• Place a "Last Updated" notation on your home page.

• Hyperlink to district website at http://www.fcps.net

• Include the Emergency Notification Notice on the home page.

Content Guidelines:

• Keep the design of the website consistent:

Choose 2-3 colors for your pages and use those throughout.

Keep the same navigation structure throughout. (FrontPage provides shared borders.)

White backgrounds have become the accepted norm -- easier to read

• Consider using a Home logo in the upper left-hand corner of every page.
• Use tables for great-looking and functional layout -- provides control over the placement of page elements.
• Follow the "three click rule" -- every page on the site should be accessible with less than 3 clicks from the home page.
• Use graphics sparingly -- graphics cause pages to download more slowly.
• Ditch the animated graphics.
• Do not underline words on the pages. (To the web user, underlined words look like hyperlinks and are confusing.)
• Stick to the most common fonts found on most computers:  Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New. You can also use Verdana, Comic Sans, Georgia and Tahoma.
• Do not use "Under Construction" pages -- don't link to a page until it is ready to be viewed.
• When using an image to indicate "New" information, use the Scheduled Picture component in FrontPage to ensure the "New" indicator goes away in time. (30 days is a good time frame and FrontPage uses this as the default for a scheduled picture.)
• Avoid changing the default hyperlink colors -- web users are used to seeing links in the default colors of blue and purple.
• Verify all hyperlinks on the website.
• Specify the size of images -- speeds up rendering in the browser and ensures that the page will format correctly if for any reason the image fails to download.

To specify size in FrontPage: right click on the image, choose Picture Properties, Appearance, and Specify Size. The image size in pixels will already be there, so there is no need to change the numbers.

• Include Alternate Text for images -- makes navigation easier for people with text-only browsers, slow connections and vision impairments.

Right click the graphic, choose Picture Properties, General tab. Under Alternative representations in the Text box, type the ALT text for the graphic.

• Avoid use of a hit counter
• Avoid use of adding an extra space after sentences.
• Use the Spell Checker. (In FrontPage, choose Tools, Page Options, General, check the box "Check spelling as you type.")
• Give the website a trial run -- check navigation, hyperlinks, etc.
• View the website in different browsers -- check for problems with wrapping and placement of page elements.
• Use white space -- adds to design of the page.
  

Guidelines specific to FCPS and/or FrontPage:

• Home page must be named either default.htm or index.htm
• Home page must be located in the root directory of your web
• Always provide navigation links on every page of your website
• Place a link to the FCPS district site --  http://www.fcps.net
• Formatting telephone numbers, email and URLs, date/time:

TIPS:

Page titles and file names have different functions and different formats:

• A page title is what appears in the browser when the page is viewed on the internet:

 

A page title is capitalized and has spaces between the words.  It's function is to identify the name of the page.

• A file name is what appears in the Folder List of the website:

A file name, also, appears in the URL of a web page.  Example: A file named homework.htm would appear in a URL as http://staff.fcps.net/jdoe/homework.htm

A file name should NOT be capitalized and should NOT have spaces between the words.  Additionally, since a file name becomes part of a URL, it should be as short as possible.