General

The Beloit College web site is a shared resource that supports and reflects the institution's mission and programmatic goals. The primary audience of the Beloit College web site is prospective students and their families. Secondary audiences include alumni, prospective donors, the Beloit community, current students, faculty, and staff, and others with an interest in the College.

The College web site serves many purposes that must be balanced and coordinated including:

• serving the College as a primary means of communication

• creating a consistent image for the campus

• providing basic information and functionality to meet College academic, administrative, and co-curricular goals

The Communications and Marketing Department and the Information Technology Department are jointly responsible for management of College web page development resources, training, and assistance, as well as policy and guideline development and maintenance. Management includes maintenance of the format, design, and organization of the College’s home page and associated upper-level pages. 

Suggestions for change are welcome and should be directed to the Chief Marketing Officer or the Chief Information Officer. The Communications and Marketing Department, and IT evaluate policies and guidelines periodically as College needs and technologies evolve.

To ensure a useful, current, interesting, and content-rich site that meets institutional needs, faculty, students, staff, and others are encouraged to contribute to and participate in the development and maintenance of the web site. At the same time, it is important that all web pages on the College web server conform to certain basic guidelines for consistency, access, and content to promote a consistent image of the College. It is critical that all information be regularly reviewed for relevancy and currency.

The Web Committee reserves the right to make recommendations and work with individuals and offices to ensure that content and links are appropriate and consistent with the mission of the web site and the College.

All web sites and pages hosted on college servers must comply with IT security requirements, especially regarding the use of scripting languages.

Requests regarding home page content and location should be sent to the Chief Marketing Officer, who will make decisions informed by the College's Integrated Marketing Plan.

The College name and logo may not be used in ways that imply endorsement of external organizations, their products, or services.

No link shall be made from the Beloit College web site to unrelated third-parties that might indicate an official endorsement by Beloit College of such parties. The Chief Marketing Officer has the authority to determine whether a link to an unrelated third-party indicates an endorsement by Beloit College. In addition, no links shall be made from the Beloit College web site to personal or commercial interests when a conflict of interest may exist. The Chief Marketing Officer, in consultation with the Director of Human Resources, will have authority to determine whether a conflict of interest exists.

Site-wide Content Guidelines:

Legality

All information on College web sites must comply with local, state, and federal laws including, but not limited to, copyright, libel, and indecency statues; College policy and standards; and reflect the mission of the College community. Violation of these laws, policies, standards, and guidelines may result in legal and/or disciplinary action and/or revocation of Beloit web site publishing privileges.

Updates/Accuracy

Content providers are responsible for keeping web information updated and accurate as per College guidelines. Please check with the appropriate office regarding all facts and figures on your web site. All sites must be reviewed once a semester for accuracy and currency. If you need assistance updating your web site, please contact webreq@beloit.edu.

Training/Updates

Everyone responsible for updating content on the site must complete CMS training in order to obtain direct access for updates. Departments and programs are responsible for assigning responsibility within their areas for content updates in order to ensure that review requirements are met; please send the name and contact information for persons responsible for content updates to Web Services. Levels of access to the CMS will be determined by Web Services staff in consultation with the appropriate supervisor and the Director of Communications and Marketing. Training sessions will be provided as needed.

Grammar and Spelling

Text on Beloit College web pages must be grammatically correct and free of spelling errors. Site developers are strongly encouraged to have their pages reviewed by another party for typographical errors and similar problems.

Acronyms should be used sparingly and never as a first reference. For questions about college style (capitalization, punctuation, proper names, etc.), review the Beloit College Style and Resource Guide at http://www.beloit.edu/news/publications/styleguide/

Web Development Software Standards:

After careful evaluation, the College has standardized web editing utilizing Reason, a content management system. Advantages of standardization include improved support, ease of updates, improved data sharing and compatibility, and cost savings.

The first several layers of the Beloit web site are designed to project a consistent look through design and navigation features. Site design standards are periodically reviewed.

Web Services provides basic, approved templates for use on the first several layers of the Beloit web site. If your content does not fit within the given templates, please contact Web Services for assistance in generating a new template that can be shared by the community as the need arises.

Types of Web Sites and Pages

 Sites on college web servers must fall into one or more of these three categories; official college, professional, or pedagogical.

Official College

Official sites are those which communicate information from and about Beloit College as an organization. These pages must utilize templates, providing consistency to viewers who are new to the Beloit College online environment. In many cases, however, templates have been designed to allow for customization within a basic, consistent shell. Additional templates may be developed upon request.

Professional

Pages conveying college-related professional interests and activities are allowed and encouraged on the web site; professional pages must utilize a basic college template and must be linked to a departmental web site. Professional pages will be limited to information that describes the professional activities of Beloit College faculty and staff. Such information includes educational experience, professional experience, research and scholarly activities, publications, presentations, collaborations, professional service opportunities (boards, committees, etc.) classes taught, and images of a professional nature.

Professional pages may also include a link to a personal page, however, users will receive a disclaimer that they are leaving the Beloit College Web site.

Note: personal web pages Personal pages and sites are created by and convey the personal interests and activities of individual faculty, staff, or students. They do not represent official positions, policies, or work of the College. Personal web pages are not hosted on College servers: Google Sites or another provider should be used for personal content.

Pedagogical

Faculty may choose to have students build web sites as a part of their teaching process: ISR welcomes this and recommends using Google Sites. Faculty should strongly consider mandating site takedown after the semester is over. Moodle is available and should be used for posting course related content such as syllabi and readings. Requests to post course information in other formats on the web will be considered on an individual basis. The Manager of Instructional Technology is available for training and support for faculty using Moodle and Google Sites.

General Guidelines for Page Design & Layout

The college seal and all logos may not be used without prior approval of the Chief Marketing Officer.

Pages must include the following components:

Link Integrity

All links throughout your site must function. As content on the web is ever-changing, so are pages to which you might link. Check your links at least once a month to ensure that they function and lead to the page you desire. If you are linking to an external web site (i.e., a site other than the Beloit College web site), it is recommended that the link open in a new browser window.

Accessibility, Usability and Browser compatibility

Pages should be viewable and usable by the broadest range of platforms, browsers, and equipment possible. Please consult Web Services for a list of common browsers and platforms.

Alternate text

To facilitate use by text-only browsers, every image should be accompanied by an ALT tag with descriptive text explaining the image. Spacing gifs, bullets, and other incidental images should use an empty ALT tag (ALT="").

Images

All images should specify HEIGHT and WIDTH to facilitate efficient page download.

Assistance and Training

Communications and Marketing maintains a style sheet that details the correct format for the college’s name, official titles and names (example: for buildings) and other college related information. http://www.beloit.edu/news/publications/styleguide/

You may contact Web Services with any questions. 

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