Working With Department Level Web Sites

How do I go about getting a site set up for my department?

1. Develop web site outline
   1. State web site mission/purpose, and intended audience
   2. Identify electronically submitted forms, links, PDFS, HTML, and image requirements
   3. Identify major content areas and gather content, utilizing the ITD lab as necessary for help with image scanning, PDF creation, etc.
2. Review roles for Editor and Approver and designate.
   1. Submit memo to Vice President or Dean requesting website creation, including role assignments (editors, approvers), outline, and desired timeframe.
   2. Project will be assigned a number and entered into the Web Services queue.
3. Web Services will contact requestor to discuss site layout, color schemes, pictures, logos, navigation and any other needs not specified in memo.
4. Requestor approves final web site layout design
5. Editors and Approver attend training via ITD lab. During that time Editors may enter content with ITD labs assistance.
6. Once the web site has been completed and is ready to be deployed, Web Services will move the site to a live status.

 

How do I change who can edit or approve my department's web site?

1. Web site Approver or respective Vice President / Dean will contact Web Services requesting a change to their web site's CMS permissions.
2. Web Services will contact all parties involved upon completion or if further information is required.
3. Any new users are required to attend CMS training at the ITD lab. Permissions for new users will be set upon the start of a training session.

 

Why does my site have to look like the rest of the SVSU site?

A decision was made to enforce a consistent look and feel for the SVSU web site to reduce confusion, clutter, and bad practices.

If you think about it, imagine coming to svsu.edu, going through the different colleges and departments, and having a million different colors and fonts and font sizes, with a thousand different orders of navigation on thousands of different pages jumping out at you.

Now compare that to how we have it now, where navigation is fairly consistent across the board, colors aren't screaming at you and are instead emphasizing the text and images, the real content, as needed.

But just because your site has to look and feel primarily like it is part of SVSU, does not mean that you can't have a degree of individuality....

 

Can I have something custom-made for my site?

Web Services employs people with many different talents ranging from graphics, photos, and logo design to content styling and formatting to web application development. We encourage you to consult with us on projects before looking into or purchasing third-party software, since that often comes with high restrictions that have to be dealt with.

One of the key requests we will handle quickly is style requests. For instance, if you want some kind of special block to display quotes on your department's web site, we can set that up for you fairly quickly. This keeps you from having scrape something together out of the available table styles and very limited text styles available.

One of our main goals is to keep our University's site looking good by enforcing consistent types of styling, but sometimes that little something extra can make a world of difference.

 

What are some good resources that may help me with my web site?

HTML

• http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutorials/getting_started/

CSS

• http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/css/
• http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

We will try to add more as we come across them. If you know of any site that is as helpful as these sites or more, please suggest it by sending the link to webmaster(at)svsu.edu.

 

Can you explain all of these acronyms to me?

(X)HTML	(Extensible) HyperText Markup Language The text that tells browsers the content of your web page.
CSS	Cascading Style Sheets Markup that tells the browser the format of your text, such as color, size, placement, alignment, and tons more.
FTP	File Transfer Protocol The Internet's way of moving files back and forth
WYSIWYG	"What You See Is What You Get" A main feature of the major web page editing tools. This allows you to edit in a mode where you see what your page will look like versus the code used to generate it.