Web Guidelines
The web team is now reviewing School, Department, Centre and Group pages and as we go through we are developing a set of guidelines to help people in the Faculty make our websites consistent and conform to best practice principles.
Apologies to the websites that have been used as "bad" examples.
All Pages Should be Included in the Menu Structure
Pages that aren't included in the menu structure are hard to find and hard to maintain (because they are hard to find).
- Bad : This page links to three staff profiles that aren't included in the menu structure.
- Better : On the Faculty site it was identified that there were more menu items than could be included (Interwoven allows a maximum of twelve menu items and twelve submenu items in each menu item) and so if you click on "Current Students" or "Future Students" in the menu you'll see that you are taken to a "mini site" with a new tab set so that the pages can be listed in the menu items.
- Good : Ideally we should be able to link to as many pages as we want in the menu structure. The web team is working with ICT so that this may be possible in Interwoven in the future. For those users using the Arts CMS you can already have as many menu items as you require.
Menu Items should only link to "Onsite" pages
When users are surfing through your page their expectation is that when they click on a menu item it will take them to another page on your site. If they click on a link within the content of the page they expect that this may take them "offsite" either to another part of the Faculty's web presence or out into the wider internet.
- Bad : So for example on this page the "Units of Study 2009" link goes offsite to the edutech list of units of study.
- Good : It would be better if the link went to a page on the Anthropology website that then had links from the content to the edutech server. This is how we've done it on the Faculty website.
Do not include dates in your menu items
Menu items should be constant. Our websites will be better optimised for search engines if the URLs remain consistent and the updates occur within those pages.
- Bad : This page, for example, could be modified to the more generic "Timetables" which means the menu item won't date.
- Good : On the Faculty page we have used "Timetables" in the menu item and then will update the content as time passes.
Improving Timetables
Arts Digital has developed a new set of tools that can generate timetables directly from the information supplied by the timetabling unit.
- Bad : On this page, for example, the timetable list has been generated by hand (which has been the only option until this point)
- Good : The page could instead include code supplied by Arts Digital to provide timetable specifically for that department in a standard easy to read format, here's an example on the Faculty page.
"Back to the Top" Links
If the page is longer than the height of your browser window, please add a "Back to the Top" link to the bottom.
Use Full Words in your Folders to Improve your URLS
Our Google ranking will improve if we use full words in our folder structures. This is a problem across the "departs" websites at the moment that we will be trying to address in the near future.
- Bad : This page uses three truncated words in it's URL "departs" instead of "department", "anthro" instead of "anthropology" and "postgrad" instead of "postgraduate". "http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/department/anthropology/postgradudate/index.shtml" would be a far more descriptive URL for a search engine bot traweling through the site.
- Good : This page on the faculty site uses full words in it's URL.
For more information on Search Engine Optimisation, please have a look at this page.
Do not link to single pages from the Tab Menu
Sometimes it can be tempting to highlight a page but linking to it as a tab rather than a menu item. This is a bad practice, it makes navigation and administration of web pages difficult and makes it more difficult to conform to the look and feel because you may not include a left hand menu on the page since it is linked to directly from the tab.
- Bad : On this site the "Members" tab and the "Contact" tab link to the "Our Members" and "Contact Us" page within the About Us section.
- Bad : This site uses offsite links within it's tabset. In this case it has also made the tabset excessively long which means it will have to wrap to another line for standard window sizes.
Do not link to offsite pages from the tab menu
In the old look and feel you could use a little icon to indicate that a tab menu link was "Offsite". This option is no longer available in the new look and feel and so there is no way to show your visitors that a tab, which they will expect will take them to another section of the site they are on, will take them to another webpage.
Use menu's correctly on the front page of your website
The first menu on your site should reflect the tab set of your site, then you might want to include the links from the "About Us" section of your site or pertinent degree pages. Finally a "Related Links" may be useful to direct vistors to sites connected with yours that may have relevant information. Do not use menu's to excess, a long list of menu's with each submenu item listed is confusing to the eye and will make your front page too long, visitors shouldn't have to scroll down if you can help it.
