What type of website are you creating?

Compliance with the general design guidelines is required regardless of the type of site you are developing. Choose what type of site you are creating below to see what other guidelines may be required.

Institutional Personal Student Organization Community

This is a departmental site or any site linked off the VCU homepage.

View Institutional Site Guidelines

This is a personal site on www.people.vcu.edu or ramsites.net.

View Personal Site Guidelines

This is a student organization site on www.studentorg.vcu.edu.

View Student Organization Site Guidelines

This is a community organization hosting their website at VCU.

View Community Site Guidelines

General design and function

Your pages should be attractive and functional and reflect positively on the university, your organization and you. The following recommendations, based on research into audience reaction, will help you achieve this goal.

Planning a site

  1. Plan ahead. Before creating your pages, determine the purpose of the site, who is the intended audience and what materials you are going to include or link to. Make up a logical "map" of your Web area.
  2. Develop content for the site. Careful attention to spelling, grammar, punctuation and word use is required.
  3. Maintain editorial consistency throughout your Web site. Refer to the VCU Identity Web site for editorial style guidelines.
  4. Avoid long pages - especially for your initial or "home" page. It is better to have several small documents linked from a table of contents than one large document.
  5. Organizations creating pages should provide links, if necessary, to pages containing authoritative information outside their areas of responsibility (i.e. policies, admissions, university mission and history, etc.) rather than creating the pages themselves. This is to ensure that the most up-to-date and accurate information is being provided.

Designing a site

  1. Maintain visual consistency across similar Web pages. Creating templates will help you achieve this objective.
  2. Web page templates are available to help you to easily create an attractive site for your department or organization.
  3. Be careful in the use of backgrounds and colored text. Make sure there is enough contrast to make your text clearly distinguishable. If you use a background graphic or color, make sure you explicitly set the text and link default colors for the page. Conversely, if you set text colors on your page, make sure you explicitly set the background color for the page.
  4. Where possible, link to standard graphics elements in the VCU Graphics Library. Since they will be used in many VCU documents, they may already be cached on your viewer's browser, therefore speeding download time of your document. When developing your own graphics, use the same graphics on multiple pages for the same reason.
  5. Avoid horizontal scrolling. Where possible, use relative widths for tables and frames since user's view the Web on different-sized monitors.

Developing a site

  1. Use "standard" HTML and avoid browser-specific code as much as possible. You never know what browser your audience may be using.
  2. Try to check your page with at least the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers for formatting and appearance.
  3. Pages should not take an excessive amount of time to load. The departmental home page or page linked from the VCU home page should load in 4 seconds or less over a 56K connection.
  4. Include a warning if a link on your page will lead to a slow-loading document.
  5. Try to keep total page size (HTML file and included images) below 100k to minimize access time. People with slow network connections tend to get tired of waiting for large files and go somewhere else.
  6. If your graphics, audio, JavaScript or Java Applets are required to get the meaning from your page, provide alternative material that does not require these items. Some people use browsers without the requisite capabilities or have them turned off for speed in access.
  7. If accessing your information requires a plugin, please provide sufficient download information.
  8. All active links should be working. Do not activate a link on your page until the linked document is available (even if you have an "under construction" notice). Repeated "File Not Found" errors will discourage visitors to your pages.

Maintaining a site

  1. Each organization creating pages is responsible for maintaining those pages and updating them in a timely manner with the latest information. The home page and/or entry page should be updated within the last six months. Provide continual review and maintenance of your pages. As organizations change so should the pages about those organizations.
  2. If you provide links to someone else's pages, check them periodically to make sure they are still active and their content is still applicable.