Taft College Web Guidelines and Standards Issued: 08/20/2012 Created by: Web Coordinator, Department of Information Technology Services I. Statement The Taft College (TC) Web development guidelines define the roles and obligations of the College, operational units, and individuals in presenting material on the TC web site. Proper use of these guidelines will protect and provide information to all faculty, staff and students. Contacts Direct any questions to your department’s supervisor. Questions about specific issues may be addressed to: Rick Garcia (Web Coordinator) rgarcia@taftcollege.edu (661) 763-­‐7920 ITS Helpdesk (Resource Questions) tcsr@taftcollege.edu (661) 763-­‐7737 Adrian Agundez (Director of Information Technology Services) aagundez@taftcollege.edu (661) 763-­‐7846 II. Definitions The Taft College (TC) Web Guideline defines the roles and obligations of the College, operational units, and individuals in presenting material on TC web sites. TC: Taft College ITS: The department of Information Technology Services. TC Web Site: Web sites that represent TC academic departments and programs, research centers and institutes, special programs, administrative offices, faculty web sites, and other College operations are official TC web pages. http://www.taftcollege.edu. Faculty Content Management Web server: is located at the address http://dl-­‐test.taftcollege.edu. Faculty Web Sites not within the Content Management System http://faculty.taftcollege.edu/ TC intranet The TC intranet is the portion of the TC web site that specifically targets internal users, primarily faculty and staff, but also students and alumni. Access to most of the TC intranet is restricted, either based on a log in account or based on IP address. Web site A web site is a group of web pages structured to provide a coherent body of information about a particular subject. Home page A home page is the initial page of a web site, or the initial page of a specific subset of a web site's information. Content Management System (CMS) The TC CMS manages static HTML web content via online templates. It allows content owners with little or no background in web technologies to create, edit, and publish web pages. It allows content owners to upload images to their website and link to other downloadable media files. The college uses an application called Wordpress for its CMS. Web site owner The web site owner for a site is the head of the operational unit (department head, manager, senior staff member). Web liaison Each official site will have a web liaison designated to work with ITS. The liaison is the web site owner unless that person delegates the role to another faculty or staff member. Web content manager The owner of an official TC web site may designate a person to handle basic hands-­‐
on technical work for the operational unit’s web site. III. Web Administration The Web Coordinator administers the TC web site with the guidance of the Public Information Committee. Web Coordinator The Web Coordinator is responsible for ensuring the reliability and general organization of the TC web site. The Web Coordinator works with web liaisons and content managers to maintain the site. Public Information Committee The College will maintain a Public Information Committee responsible for establishing and reviewing a priority structure for web development, including reviewing cases of conflicting priority; and assisting the Web Coordinator with strategic planning and decisions. IV. Legal Notice Web site owners are responsible for the content and design of their web sites. These responsibilities include ensuring that all online material conforms to local, state, and federal laws including copyright and other intellectual property laws, license agreements, and contracts. Where appropriate, web site owners should protect material from inappropriate access. All online material and conduct must adhere to College policies and regulations. Web sites should not provoke activity that interferes with the primary mission of the College. ITS has the right to review any pages or activities that generate network traffic to a degree that deprives other users of their legitimate use of these resources or impedes the efficient operation of the network. Use of TC’s web resources to promote a commercial venture is specifically prohibited. Web site owners generally should avoid posting images or audio of people without their consent or using information about individuals who do not want the information posted. Copyright Notice Even if a document or image on the web does not have a copyright notice, it is still protected by copyright laws. If you are trying to protect your own work, it is always a good idea to have a copyright notice on your page. For images, you can add watermarks and other copyright information into the image itself using special software, and you should also include your copyright in the alt text. When is Copying Something an Infringement? The most common types of copyright infringement on the web are images being used on web sites other than the owners. It doesn't matter if you copy the image to your web server or point to it on their web server. If you use an image on your web site that you didn't create, you must get permission from the owner. It is also common for the text, HTML, and script elements of a page to be taken and reused. If you have not gotten permission, you have violated the owner's copyright. V. Taft College Web Standards The official entry point to the TC web site is through the TC web server located at http://www. taftcollege.edu. TC will host all of its official web sites on TC servers. The Public Information Committee may approve exceptions in cases of cooperative programs with other higher education institutions or their partners. In accordance with other College policies, operational units may not operate their own servers without prior approval from Information Technology Services. Non-­‐taftcollege.edu domain names may not point to official TC web sites without prior approval from the Public Information Committee. Information Technology Services will purchase and maintain all approved domain names for the College. VI. Content Web site owners must ensure that all information on their web sites is accurate and timely. Official Web sites All academic departments and programs, research centers and institutes, special programs, administrative offices, faculty and other College operations may maintain through the use of a CMS, Web sites. Such Web sites should contain only information that the department or organization is deemed to "own" on behalf of TC, or is in the public domain, or for which the information's owner has granted permission for its inclusion in the page. Web site owners wishing to provide access to information about other aspects of the College should do so by way of links to pages owned by the appropriate operational units. The web site owner has overall responsibility for all content and links from the site. The owner may designate a web liaison or a web content manager as the contact for the site. Official web sites may link to related personal web sites. The web site owner is responsible for approving any such links. It is the responsibility of the web site owner to ensure the removal of any content determined, after appropriate investigation, to violate any local, state, or federal law or College policy. VII. Design Official web sites must either use a standard TC web template provided by the Web Coordinator or the web site owner must work with the Web Coordinator to develop an approved nonstandard template. Web site owners wishing to develop a non-­‐
standard template will contact the Web Coordinator first to discuss the issue and obtain detailed requirements. The Web Coordinator will review all non-­‐standard templates for usability, accessibility, and College branding. The Public Information Committee will decide ultimate resolution of disputes regarding web design. Intranet sites need not adhere to the same web design standards as other TC web sites. Web site owners, however, should attempt to incorporate standard TC web design elements into their web sites. VIII. Outsourcing If a web site owner seeks web development assistance, paid or volunteer, outside of ITS, the College does not guarantee that it will add the products of that labor to the TC web site. Web site owners considering outsourcing web development should contact ITS first. ITS may take on the project. Alternately, ITS will assist the web site owner to ensure that outsourcing efforts are not wasted. IX. Termination of service Monitoring ITS does not routinely pre-­‐screen, monitor, or regularly review most posted CMS content. However, ITS reserves the right to suspend or remove, at any time, any content that it considers to violate these Web Guidelines or the terms of any other campus user agreements that may govern use of the campus networks, or that it deems in violation of college policy or local, state, or federal law. Taft College Administration will contacted if a site where deemed inappropriate and conflicts with existing college policies and terms of service. Should the college receive reports regarding a Web site on which it is felt that inappropriate content has been posted, ITS will investigate and contact the site's content approver and Administration to initially discuss the issue. In exceptional cases, where the content is obviously unacceptable, ITS will immediately remove or suspend the content. Reports regarding inappropriate content may be sent to rgarcia@taftcollege.edu Voluntary termination Users may choose at any time to terminate use of the Web CMS to manage their Web content. Users shall provide two weeks advance notice of their intent to leave the system. X. System availability Unless temporarily removed from service for maintenance, patching of the servers or technical difficulties, the Web CMS shall be operational 24 hours per day. When the Web CMS will be removed from service for scheduled maintenance or upgrades, ITS will inform all users of the date, time and duration of the planned service interruption in advance of the scheduled loss of service. In the event of extended CMS downtime, Users may elect, if necessary, to edit previously published Web content on their local Web servers. ITS will provide the client with a process to request system status and support if the CMS is inaccessible because the system is down or access to users is denied. XI. CMS Technical Requirements Web Browsers The TC CMS supports the current versions of Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer. Some issues with the CMS could be fixed by upgrading to the current versions of the users web browser. Web site space limit on Faculty CMS server Each individual Faculty CMS site has a size restriction of 100 MB. Large files can and should be placed on the TC Media Server. Links can be placed on the CMS sites to these files on the Media Server. Contact rteel@taftcollege.edu for information about uploading to the Media server. Media types and file size upload restrictions The WIKI sites can support faculty files that are PowerPoint, calculator files, and executable needed for classes. The CMS only supports the uploads of these file types: pdf, .doc, .docx, .rtf, .jpg, .jpeg, and .gif. Each upload is limited to a file size of 1500 KB or 1.5 MB. Videos The Faculty CMS site owner has two options when adding video content. Either upload the videos to the TC Media Server and link to them from the CMS site or upload their videos to a free video hosting site like www.youtube.com and link to the videos once uploaded from their CMS site. The Faculty CMS does not allow any video uploads directly to the CMS server. XII. Web Accessibility The site owner will make a reasonable effort to ensure the web site is accessible and usable by people of all abilities and disabilities. Refer to this web page on how to make your site web accessible: http://www.taftcollege.edu/tcwp/instruction/?page_id=1412