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 Aaron Isaacs. 

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 -- Teacher web pages are located on http://staff.fcps.net or on Fayette's iSchool. Do not link to a teacher's website which is housed on a server other than these.

• 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://www.fcps.net/administration/departments/child-nutrition/school-menus to select the breakfast and lunch menus links for your school.)

• School background and history, academic programs, mission statement, belief statements, et al. 

• 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.

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

Content Guidelines:

• 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. 
• Do not use "Under Construction" pages -- don't link to a page until it is ready to be viewed. .
• 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.
• Avoid use of adding an extra space after sentences. (Use only one space, rather than two.)
• 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 UMBRACO:

• 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 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.