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WEBGUIDE BEREA.EDU 2016 PAGE
BEREA COLLEGE WEBGUIDE
BEREA.EDU 2016
(MS Word file format)
CONTENTS(review ver. 1/20/2017)
Preface 2
Roles and Responsibilities 4
Web Communications Terminology 5
Designing and Developing Berea.edu 2016 10
Accessibility 11
Search Engine Optimization 16
Content Guidelines 18
Planning and Re-planning Web Content 18
Text 18
Photographs 20
Infographics 22
Video 22
Persistent Components 24
Navigation 25
Graphics, Interface and Typography 27
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Appendix A: Online Learning Opportunities (WordPress, Visual Composer) 34
Appendix B: Recommended Photo and Video sizes 35
Photo sizes 35
Sizing for Video 38
PREFACE
Berea.edu usually contains between 70 and 110 subsites. These are “owned by” administrative offices (e.g., Human Resources, Office of the President), service offices (e.g., student services, public safety), Centers (e.g., Center for Transformative Learning, Center for Excellence in Learning through Service), facilities (e.g., Seabury Gym, Jelkyl Drama Center) and academic programs (30 programs of study). Page count for Berea.edu oscillates between 3,500 and 4,500.
The audiences we want Berea.edu to attract include:
· Current and prospective students and their families
· Current and prospective faculty
· Current and prospective donors
· Everyone interested in and thinking about Appalachia
· Everyone interested in and thinking about private non-profit Colleges that charge no tuition
· Those interested in the first integrated and co-educational college in the South (founded in 1855)
Berea College aspires toward a web presence that is as excellent and distinctive as the institution itself. The college is perennially ranked at or near the top of lists that weigh
· affordability
· academic excellence
· faculty/student ratios
· rates of graduation
· quality of residential life
· sustainability
· diversity
· regional impact
Understanding what makes the Web Work
Compelling content that is easily discovered are the keys to a successful web site.
Web professionals have studied successful content and usability and identified perspectives within which “best practices” can be demonstrated, verified and widely applied. Some examples:
· The Internet’s oldest and still most prevalent mode of communication is text. However, usability studies demonstrate repeatedly that text on the Internet is NOT read the same as printed text. Far more visitors scan text on the web rather than read word-for-word. The concept of providing text so it works for people who scan has introduced and continues to introduce new kinds of best practices for web authors.
· With the advent of widespread broadband Internet service, the world of so-called rich media has come of age on the web. And—similar to the early years of desktop publishing—the proliferation of low quality multimedia has been explosive on the web. Hence more best practices.
· Search engines—Google, Yahoo, Bing and others—provide THE essential service to the public web. It is not an overstatement to say, “Without them, we wouldn’t find much.” Search engines have become the most obvious source of horsepower behind effective public information technology. That makes Search Engine Optimization—SEO—an essential skill for web-based communicators. That skill is growing its own set of best practices.
· In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act set about redressing the way we accommodate those among us with disabilities. Initially that act called for curbs negotiable to those in wheelchairs, telephones that accommodated text exchange, closed captioning of videos and films and now it’s caught up with the web. Augmented with stricter coding guidelines and a growing number of assistive technologies, the web can be accessed by the blind, the deaf and those with reading and learning disabilities. Becoming compliant with the guidelines for making web sites accessible is becoming mandatory and means another set of best practices.
These perspectives motivated the web communications office at Berea College to mount a comprehensive web content audit (CWCA) in 2014.
When we moved to our first Web Content Management System (WCMS) in 2012, we were in a hurry. The challenge was to move everything into the WCMS as fast as possible and get it working on line. Only after that would we take a deep breath and start thinking about cleanup and content improvements.
With the conversion behind us, we commenced an 18-month series of “web boot camps” for web content managers. Every Berea.edu subsite WCM or web administrator was invited to attend a training session. We naively thought training these personnel on WordPress would initiate a do-it-yourself frenzy of updating and improving 3,800 pages of Berea.edu. A close look at many of our subsites today reveals countless pages that were last updated in the summer months of 2012—in other words, when we moved everything to the first version of our web content management system. Clean up and improvements never happened on hundreds of our pages.
So, in addition to all those new perspectives discussed above—and all the “best practices” associated with them—we still face the task of clean up and updating content.
ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
WEB TEAM is part of the Marketing & Communications Group in the Alumni & College Relations Division.
The web team is responsible for the design, development and on-going functionality of Berea.edu and all its components. Specific responsibilities include:
· Work with site host WPEngine to ensure full-time functionality of Berea.edu.
· Ensure Berea.edu complies with web content accessibility guidelines set forth in the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 levels “A” and “AA.”[1]
· Ensure Berea.edu’s most important pages[2] are optimized for search engines (SEO).
SUBSITES are parts of Berea.edu that cover a subject, activity, service or program. Subsites have their own “home pages,” their own assortment of landing and attendant pages, a media library and staff to manage content.
SUBSITE “OWNERS” are staff and/or faculty in the programs, offices, centers and other college organizations that “own” subsites in Berea.edu 2016.
Subsite owners are responsible for the content in their subsite. To that end, subsite owners are required to designate one member of their staff or faculty to be “Web Content Manager” (WCM). Some WCM’s are trained by the web team to make their own edits online. In other cases, the WCM has another staff member or a student laborer trained to work on their subsite.
Some specific responsibilities for “owners” and WCMs:
· Check regularly for out-of-date information. When you find out-of-date information, update it if applicable, or archive it or purge it.
· Replace photographs periodically. (Exceptions are illustrative photos or graphics that pertain to the text.) Banner photos are those that can typically be replaced regularly.
· Ensure that text is free of typographical errors or misspellings, and the sentences are readable at Grade level 10. (Use the Hemingway App[3] or a comparable tool to review your readability level and make adjustments.)
WEB COMMUNICATIONS TERMINOLOGY
BEREA.EDU is the name and the web address for Berea College’s web site. Beyond the homepage and its immediate off-shoot pages (“News,” “About Berea College,” “Consumer Information and Student Right to Know” etc.) Berea.edu also consists of about 110 subsites. These subsites contain information from Administrative Offices, Admissions, Student Life, Centers, Service Units on campus, Academic Programs and Facilities.
WEB COMMUNICATIONS is the name of the office with principle responsibility for content. Content is managed in these ways:
· Currency (up to date information)
· Readability (Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease and Grade level test—goal is grade level 10)
· Accessibility (WCAG 2.0 Levels “A” and “AA
· Search Engine Optimization
WEB COMMUNICATIONS ADVISORY COMMITTEE consists of a subordinate staff member reporting directly to each member of the college’s Administrative Committee (i.e., a direct report to each Vice President and CIO). The Advisory Committee will meet at least bi-annually (Fall and Spring term), and address issues of web content, web design and development. Members of the committee will be polled on matters of interest for meeting agendas. (This committee has not been formalized.)
WEB CONTENT AUTHORS (WCA) are writers, bloggers, photographers and videographers—staff, faculty or students—who are credentialed to upload content on one or more subsites. They become the responsibility of the WCM for the subsite(s) they service. The Web Communications office issues credentials for this role upon written instruction from the subsite WCM.
WEB CONTENT EDITORS (WCE) are either college staff or student labor with access to a specific subsite’s content for editorial and maintenance purposes.
WEB CONTENT MANAGERS (WCM) are college staff or faculty charged with supervision of content on one or more subsites inside Berea.edu. The name of the WCM and an office email address [e.g. appears in the page content of the subsite(s) they service. At least one annual meeting per year for web content managers is arranged and hosted by the Web Communications office. (This annual meeting has not been formalized.)
WEB MATERIALS are electronic documents made available via HTTP or other web protocol and accessed through a web browser (either a standalone browser, or as a component of another application). Web materials may be further described using these terms:
1. Official: Web material by or for a unit or employee of the college.
2. Public: Official web material that is publicly accessible.
3. Internal: Official web material with restricted access, either by password or network/server security.
4. Off-site: Official web material that is served from computers that do not belong to Berea College
5. Hosted: Web material created for an entity other than Berea College that is served from computers belonging to the college.
WEB TEAM is a work group in the Marketing & Communications Department of the Alumni & College Relations Division.
Administration:
VP Alumni & College Relations—Bernadine Douglas
AVP Marketing & Communications—Currently Vacant
Web team Staff
Director of Web Design & Development—Charlie Campbell
Senior Developer—Daniel Adams
Developer—Joseph Carrick
Web Content Manager—Doug Widner
WordPress Administrator—Zack Thompson
Student Labor
Web Services Assistant (WLS 1, 2)—Currently Vacant
Web Services Associate (WLS 3, 4)—Logan Holbert, Jose Ixcoy,
Jaimah Pyburn, China Ibuakaeze
Web Services Manager (WLS 5)—Job Limo
Check out the evolution of Berea.edu since its first version in 1998
Circa 2012: First web content management system (WCMS) built with WordPress Multisite
Berea.edu 2016: WCMS Ver. 2, still WordPress Multisite
DESIGNING AND DEVELOPING BEREA.EDU 2016
Our first web content management system (WCMS) was Berea.edu 2012. It was designed and developed using WordPress Multisite. The 2012 design was identical to a design originally created in 2009 and very slowly unrolled to a few subsites. It wasn’t until the 2012 transition to WordPress Multisite that we applied the 2012 design to all subsites. For the first time all the parts of Berea.edu looked like they belonged to a single web entity. Unfortunately, the 2012 design was already growing stale by that time. The boxy, one-dimensional quality of Berea.edu 2012 had lost favor.
We acquired a web designer in 2014. Folks from all corners of the campus have been eager to point to other college and university websites they liked better than Berea.edu 2012. A brand new design for Berea.edu made its appearance in mid-2015 and received approval from the Administrative Committee in late 2015. Berea.edu 2016 wears this new design.
The most distinctive differences between the new design and the old are:
· A responsive theme. This means pages are reassembled automatically to present the most usable organization based on the size of the visitor’s screen.
· The design employs “layers” that lend it a 3-dimensional quality that is both contemporary and aesthetically pleasing.
· Multiple modes of navigating the site are built in:
o So called “persistent navigation” is available on every page
o Subsite-specific navigation is tabular and located on the right side of most pages
o “Search” is always available
In short, Berea.edu 2016 has been designed for usability.
ACCESSIBILITY
Berea College will offer a World Wide Web presence that meets the accessibility guidelines set forth in the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Levels “A” and “AA.” The college’s website must comply with these guidelines to be considered an accessible web site. To make the whole set of guidelines easier to comprehend, W3C has divided the 11 guidelines containing 34 compliance points between 4 overriding “Principles.”
Principle 1: Perceivable – Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
Guideline 1.1 Text Alternatives: Provide text alternatives for any non-text content so that it can be changed into other forms people need, such as large print, braille, speech, symbols or simpler language.
· 1.1.1 (A) Non-text Content: text alternatives are provided for all non-text content.
Guideline 1.2 Time-based Media: Provide alternatives for time-based media.
· 1.2.1 (A) Audio-only and Video-only (Prerecorded): An alternative for time-based media is provided for prerecorded audio-only or video-only content.
· 1.2.2 (A) Captions (prerecorded): Captions are provided for all prerecorded audio content.
· 1.2.3 (A) Audio Description or Media Alternative (Prerecorded): An alternative for time-based media or audio description of the prerecorded video content is provided.
· 1.2.4 (AA) Captions (Live): Captions are provided for all live video content.
· 1.2.5. (AA) Audio Description (Prerecorded): Audio description is provided for all prerecorded video content.
Guideline 1.3 Adaptable: Create content that can be presented in different ways (for example: simpler layout) without losing information or structure.
· 1.3.1 (A) Info and Relationships: Information, structure, and relationships can be programmatically determined or are available in text.
· 1.3.2 (A) Meaningful Sequence: When sequence affects meaning, a correct reading sequence can be programmatically determined.
· 1.3.3 (A) Sensory Characteristics: Instructions do not rely solely on sensory characteristics (shape, size, visuals, orientation, sound).
Guideline 1.4 Distinguishable: Make it easier for users to see and hear content, including separating foreground from background.
· 1.4.1 (A) Use of Color: Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information.
· 1.4.2 (A) Audio Control: A mechanism is available to pause or control the volume of audio that plays automatically.