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UH-Downtown UHD.edu Web Design Guidelines
Up to Contact/Technical Information

The UHD web team developed these guidelines to assist you in creating a professional-looking website for your department or personal use. Our goal in creating these guidelines is not to restrict, but to guide. We hope that by following them, you will be able to create a website that reflects your department's personality, while maintaining the image that UHD hopes to provide with its web presence.

Website design begins with careful planning. You should decide what the content will be, and how you want to structure it before you begin the actual design work. A well-designed website makes it easy for the viewer to navigate and find the needed information. Planning ahead can also make updating the site easier.


Site purpose and content

First, decide how the site will serve the intended audience (i.e. access to reference materials). The more that is known about the target audience, the better they can be served through the site and the easier it will be to determine what information to include in the site.

Decide what the exact purpose of the site will be. Make a list of what you want this website to be able to provide to its visitors. From that list you should be able to start to organize your site into logical sections.

Websites often have the following purposes:

• Inform visitors of what organization/person the site represents
• Give information on how to contact the organization/person the site represents
• Introduce key people that site visitors may want or need to know about
• Give access to paperwork, handouts, statistical information, online forms and other types of materials that are available
• Inform visitors of event schedules
• Answer frequently asked questions (FAQ)
  

Navigation

The navigation of a website should be obvious to new visitors and totally consistent throughout the entire site. The UHD.edu web template has a navigation section built the page to assist you in keeping site navigation tools consistent. Ideally, you should incorporate the UHD.edu web template into every page on your site. The UHD.edu navigation bar is considered a required element for each page, or, for the primary (index) page of each site. If you are not using the UHD.edu template, then remember to:

• Keep your navigation icons in the same place on the screen.
• Use the same color scheme for all links in your website throughout the entire website.
• Use the same navigation icons throughout your entire site.

Structure

The UHD.edu directory structure will be defined and maintained by IT. Within the directory assigned to you, it's a good idea to have all of the files for a site organized into logical subdirectories. This helps in maintaining and tracking down broken links in your site and will help others who may be editing your site later to see where all of the appropriate files are located.

What technology to include

You should define your target audience (the people you suspect will most likely visit your website) and limit the types of technology included in your site to what you believe they are most likely to have available. For example, it would probably be a bad idea to include large multimedia files in your site if you suspect that most of your viewers will be accessing your site from slower Internet connections.

A word about where your web page should be published

The university requires that any web page/site that contains official university business/information be hosted on the UHD.EDU main web server and NOT in personal UNIX account web directory.

Personal web pages that do not directly involve official university business may be stored in personal server (UNIX) accounts, but should not be directly attached to UHD.edu. For more information on the server on which your site should be published, please contact Information Technology at 700-S or call 713-221-8400.