• Search IT
• About IT
• IT for Students
• IT for Faculty
• IT for Staff
• Services
• Help
• Documentation
• IT Home

Creating Departmental Web Sites

A guide for Web site owners and developers

The person who initiates the development of a Web site is considered its "owner".   Web sites can only be initiated by a vice president, dean, department chair, or director. The Web site owner and the person who actually converts (develops) the supplied content into a Web-ready product are rarely the same person. The person who develops the Web site is known as its Information Provider or IP and is appointed by the site owner. (Site owners should see: Guidelines for the care and maintenance of your IP.)

The following guidelines are for both the initiator/owner of the site and their IPs.

• For the owner of the site
  • Before you Start
  • Policies
  • Appoint a Web Information Provider
• For the developer of the site
  • Information Provider Training
  • Developing your site
  • Testing your site
  • Publishing your site
  • Special considerations when developing electronic forms
  • Linking to your site from the CCRI home page or other top level pages
  • Ongoing Maintenance

Before You Start

Read CCRI's Web publishing policies and Web Publishing Guidelines & Requirements before you begin the planning of your site. Refer back to these guidelines as you develop your web site. Another great resource for planning your web site can be found in the Web Style Guide, Ch. 1.

Planning: The more time you spend planning your site before developing the web pages, the less time you will spend re-working the more time-consuming web development work. Content (text and images) can be developed and circulated for review and approval in a Word document. In fact, most people will find it easier to make changes or comments when it is in Word.

Discuss the information that you want to provide on the web site within your department/organization. Get everyone who will have a say after the site is built, involved before the site is built. For example, your department head should be involved in the planning stages of your web site; they should not be seeing it for the first time after it's already developed in to a web site. This early involvement of all participants in the process will result in much lighter revisions once you begin to develop the actual pages and circulate them for feedback.

Set up an initial meeting with Web Services to outline the information that you want to provide and any concerns or questions you may have.

Web Publishing Policies

1. Who may publish on the web site
   1. Pages linked to the CCRI home page and upper-level pages may be created by academic departments, administrative departments, college-sanctioned organizations or committees, and official student organizations.
   2. Faculty and staff may publish professional pages. The author bears full responsibility for the contents of these Web pages.
   3. Each entity wishing to publish on the web is responsible for naming a Web Information Provider who will maintain that entity’s web pages. The Web Information Provider must be a full time CCRI employee or a permanent part-time employee. A vice president, dean, department chair, or director must approve the allocation of this responsibility.
      
2. Web Information Providers (IP)
   1. A full-time (or permanent part-time) CCRI employee approved by a vice president, dean, department chair, or director
   2. Responsible for updating and maintaining the appointing organization's web pages using FrontPage 2003.
3. Publishing Guidelines - The contents of the site, including all department, organization and program sub-sites, should follow these guidelines:
   1. Templates
      1. Web pages must use the official college templates which contain the college masthead, links to top-level pages, a customizable footer and are developed using the official college style sheets.
   2. Footers
      1. Web pages must contain a customized footer which displays the following information and links:
         1. A CCRI logo which links to the CCRI home page.
         2. A separate text link to the CCRI home page
         3. A text link to the organization's home page
         4. Contact information, including an e-mail link, for person(s) responsible for the content and maintenance of the site.
         5. This footer is already included in the template package placed in each site.
            
   3. Date Stamps
      1. Web pages must contain a date stamp declaring the date of last revision to the page.
   4. Original Content
      1. Information providers should publish original content, which can only be found on their site, and for which the department or organization is responsible.
         
         **IMPORTANT** Web pages that provide the reader with information on course offerings or descriptions should provide links to the online schedule and catalog information rather than duplicating it on their site. Duplication of catalog or online schedule information on organization, faculty or staff web sites is strictly forbidden.
   5. Academic Content
      1. To ensure appropriate protection, faculty should limit access to copyrighted content to only their enrolled students utilizing either MyCCRI course tools or Blackboard. Access should require authentication by enrolled students.
   6. Accessibility
      1. Web Information Providers must use the provided page templates (see 3a. above). These templates are developed using best practices for information design, which comply with federal and state accessibility laws.  See:
         1. Federal: Section 508: The Road to Accessibility
         2. State: Rhode Island Government : Accessibility Policy
      2. Reasonable recommendations for additions to the templates and style sheets may be accommodated by contacting Web Services

Appoint a Web Information Provider

Your department/organization/program head must designate a Web Information Provider (IP) to develop and coordinate your organization's content on the web and update the site using FrontPage 2003.  An IP must be either a full time or permanent part-time CCRI employee (see Who may publish on the web site).  A Vice President, Associate VP, Dean, Department Chair, or Director must approve the allocation of this responsibility to the nominated IP.

Please note: There can be many content providers for a site, (for example, writers, photographers, proofreaders, etc.), but there can only be one IP per organization.  The IP will be trained in basic web development and editing using FrontPage 2003 by Web Services, then given login access to your web site on the test server.  The Information Provider’s Agreement details the responsibilities of the IP. The appointed IP must complete the form and submit it online.

Information Provider Training

The IP needs to be familiar with the FrontPage 2003 web authoring tool and trained on how to develop web documents on our test server and get them published to the live server. Full-time employees can obtain a copy of the program from the help desk on the Knight Campus. The IP can register for training sessions offered by the Web Services division of Information Technology here.

Front Page 2003 Tutorials are another resource which will support the IP's web development efforts.  We would also suggest your organization purchasing a couple of good introductory books on XHTML and CSS. One we would recommend is, "HTML, XHTML, & CSS" by Elizabeth Castro (pictured on right).  There are many suggestions for books on web design on this Web site.

Developing your site

Once the department/organization has named an IP and the IP has had a brief preliminary training session regarding procedures for publishing to the CCRI web site, Web Services will create a Front Page web on the test server where the IP can develop and test their web pages.

The organization's web site will contain page templates that include the CCRI style elements.  The IP must utilize these templates for page content.  To use the templates see: Creating Web Pages from Templates.

Testing your site

To accurately test your Web site it must be previewed on the web, using a web browser.  Do NOT use the "Preview" view tab in FrontPage to preview you pages --it is inaccurate and misleading. You need to see the pages the way your visitors will see them --in a browser, on the web.

At this time (fall 2009) the most popular browser is Internet Explorer 7.  Be sure you test your site with the browser most frequently used by visitors to the CCRI site.  Statistics showing this are available in our Web site statistics. Once you get to the statistics page, click on the latest month's stats, then see "Browsers & Platforms". To view world-wide stats on browser market share, see this site.

The easiest way to test a web page is to open the page in FrontPage, select, "File > Preview in Browser > Internet Explorer 7" from the FrontPage menu.  If you do not have Internet Explorer 7 on your machine, we recommend you do the following:

• If you have Internet Explorer 6, upgrade to IE 7 here (Be careful NOT to download IE 8 by mistake --Microsoft is really pushing it by making the IE 8 button the most prominent button on the IE 7 page.  Look for "Get Internet Explorer 7" below the IE 8 button.)
• If you already have IE 8 installed, you may preview your pages with it but, try to find a machine in your office or at home which still has IE 7 on it so you can review your pages there as well.

Publishing your site

Once the test site has been developed and tested by the IP, on the web, in a browser, the web site address (URL) should be sent to anyone within the organization who must approve the content before it can be published to the live server.  Once tested and approved, the site can be published to the live CCRI web site.

In order to publish, the IP sends email to Web Services including the root URL of the site, if the entire site is to be published, or the URLs of individual pages, if only those pages are to be published. The Web site manager then reviews the pages/site for compliance with the web publishing guidelines and either publishes the pages and sends a confirming e-mail back to the IP or provides the IP with feedback, if alterations are necessary before the pages/site can be published. For a detailed tutorial, see: How to Get Your Pages & Files Published.

After the site is published to the production (live) web server, the pages/site is then accessible to the world via the WWW.

IMPORTANT! Upon receiving confirmation that the requested pages/site has been published, it is the IPs responsibility to immediately review those pages/site on the live server to ensure that all pages and related files and links are in working order. For tips about some common publishing pitfalls see: "Before you send the request to have your pages published..." on the How to Get Your Pages & Files Published page.

Linking to your site from the CCRI home page or other top level pages

The Marketing & Communications Department determines which sites/pages should be linked to from the CCRI user index pages, e.g. For Students, College Directory, College Depts., etc. or receive temporary promotional links on the college home page. You may submit these type of requests to pr@ccri.edu. Permanent links on the aforementioned pages are reserved for the most frequently visited and/or requested areas of our site, as determined by the web site stats.

Ongoing Maintenance

The IP maintains web content in the departmental web in a timely fashion and reviews all changes made to pages by viewing them on the live site after they are published.

The IP e-mails Web Services with a specific list of files that have been changed and the Web Site Manager publishes these files to the production web server.

The IP should notify Public Relations & Publications at pr@ccri.edu  about significant new content that may be considered as features on the college's home page.

Important: Removing files from your live site. Simply removing a link to a file on a given page and republishing the page does not make the formerly linked file inaccessible by visitors to our site. Since any file on the live server can be found via search engine, it is the responsibility of the IP to periodically request that obsolete files be removed from the live server.  This can be done a number of ways:

• On the test site, mark any files which you wish to remove from the live server "Don't publish" and request that the entire site be republished.
• On the test site, mark any files which you wish to remove from the live server "Don't publish" and request that Web Services remove these same files from the live server.
• On the test site, mark any files which you wish to remove from the live server "Don't publish" and send an e-mail to Web Services with the URL(s) of the files you want removed from the live server.
• Important: When removing an HTML file, be sure to also remove any files which are referenced in that HTML page, such as images, audio and video files, etc. UNLESS these referenced files are also being referenced from another page which isn't being deleted. 
  • You can check this in the "Hyperlinks" view in FrontPage.  In the screen shot below, pages or files linking TO the file in the middle, (the file which is selected in the "Folder List"), are shown to the left of the selected file:
    
    
    
    If there are no files to the left of the selected file, then it is not being used by any other page, (a.k.a. an "orphan") and can be marked "Don't publish" and requested to be removed from the live server.