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 School/Class Web Programs. 

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 file name of 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:  Verdana, Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New. You can also use 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 only one space, rather than two.)
• 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.