Web

What We Do

The web team can help keep your university web pages polished and updated. We can assist with site organization, such as figuring out where to put new content; page updates, such as adding new photos or feature boxes; and comprehensive website redesign projects. Whatever your website goals are, the Marketing & Communications web team can help you reach them.

Web Guidelines

Getting Started

Marketing & Communications can help with web pages within the weber.edu domain. This can include changing visual elements, adding or removing text or creating a new page (or series of pages) altogether. If you choose to go outside the weber.edu domain, you will lose our IT and web design support.
Once we've completed a web project for you, the maintenance is your responsibility. Before you get started maintaining this site, there are a few steps you need to take to familiarize yourself with Site Manager and best practices for maintaining WSU’s professional, cohesive online presence. Anyone with access to your site is required to review all trainings and resources mentioned here.

Learn the Basics

Identify your main “web guru” who will be the primary point of contact for maintaining the site. We strongly discourage giving every single person in your department website editing access. Please pick one to two people to act as a primary point of contact for anyone within the department who needs changes made to the site.

If you still have questions after completing these trainings, please reach out. We are happy to schedule a meeting to answer questions or walk you through a certain process with which you are struggling.

Web Accessibility

Having accessible web pages means having web content accessible to all users, including those with disabilities who may use assistive technology while browsing our website. This is a top priority for Weber State. You should have an understanding of website accessibility before editing a page on your site. Along with being a good practice in general, web accessibility is required by law as part of The Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act in the U.S., and a range of international regulations. Websites that do not meet these standards leave Weber State vulnerable to lawsuits.

Best Practices

 DO:

  • Perform regular maintenance. Make it a once-a-semester project to update faculty/staff pages, and make sure someone is regularly updating news/events pages.
  • Have someone proofread when you are making changes to a page. Even the best of us make mistakes.
  • Label links descriptively. Do not use “click here,” or “visit this page.” Link text should clearly identify what the user will find on the new page.
    • Example: For more information, visit our homepage.

 DON’T:

  • Add a new main navigation tab for every single page you add to the site. Websites that are poorly organized or have 25 main navigation tabs are hard to navigate.
  • Use academic jargon. Web content should be in simple English.
  • Put text on images, as screen readers won’t pick it up causing visually impaired users to miss out on the content. If it is necessary to use a complex image to convey information, contact Marketing & Communications to see if there are ways to make it accessible.
  • Add all new info at the top of the page. Think about where any new information fits into the site as a whole.
  • Use larger or different color text for emphasis. For example, don’t use red text or underlined text for emphasis.

Naming files, pages and sites

File names, folder names and web addresses should be styled consistently across weber.edu.
This is based on research-based direct recommendations from Google.

 DO:

  • Separate words in the Site Manager “Name” field with hyphens. This becomes the name of the web page file.
    • Ex: /marketing-and-communications.html
  • Separate words in uploaded file names (images, documents, etc) also with hyphens.
    • Ex: /image-of-campus-early-morning.jpg
    • Ex: /student-release-form.pdf
  • Separate words in the “Title” field with spaces. This becomes the title users see in the browser tab.
  • Make your title, page and file names as descriptive as possible. Spell it out with hyphens.
    • Ex: /college-of-advanced-marketing.html
  • NOT: /coam.html
  • Make “Name” and “Title” fields in the Site Manager dashboard and “Page Title” in the page template all match, if not exactly, then as close as possible. The page title entered in the template is displayed at the top of the page.

 DON’T:

  • Use underscores, spaces or capital letters to separate words in the Site Manager “Name” field.
    • Ex: /marketing and communications.html
    • Ex: /MarketingAndCommunications.html
  • Use underscores, spaces or capital letters to separate words in file names.
    • Ex: /image_of_campus Early_Morning.jpg
    • Ex: /StudentRelease form.pdf
  • Use abbreviations, acronyms or initials as page titles if possible. Their meaning is not always clear to users.
    • Ex: https://www.weber.edu/SocNurStu.html

Additional Resources

Writing for the Web can help you learn about how to best organize your content on a webpage, write good headings and more.

Please reach out about major changes or any questions you may have about Site Manager.

Contact

Web Content Manager, Anna Burleson
801-626-6347
annaburleson@weber.edu

Associate UI/UX Developer, Rachel Middleton
801-626-7363
rachelmiddleton@weber.edu

Web Content Editor, Academic Affairs, Alexandra Lopez-Nadal
801-626-7972
alexandranadal@weber.edu

Web Content Editor, Patrick Carr
patrickcarr@weber.edu