Download Lunch and Learn

Maintaining a Website
April 2008
Old vs New
• www.nynjtc.org
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Maintained with Dreamweaver/Contribute
Style is fixed by template (header, left menu, content, footer)
Content obeys a bunch of unwritten conventions
Files/pages/images are placed into a file hierarchy (unwritten
conventions)
• new.nynjtc.net
– Maintained with Content Management System (Drupal)
– Style is fixed by theme (header, left sidebar, right sidebar,
content, footer)
– Content obeys a bunch of yet to be written conventions
– Files/pages/images go into system defined places
Common to Old/New
• Writing content for the web obeys different
rules than writing for print media
• Usability
• Navigation and Information Architecture
• Obeying web conventions
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Writing Content
• Inverted style, similar to newspapers – 2
sentence rule
• Concise
• Simple words (6th grade)
• Avoid acronyms
• Skip jargon
• No sarcasm
• Format for readability
Format for Readability
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Short descriptive titles and headings
Highlight keywords
Bulleted/numbered lists
Short paragraphs
NO ALL UPPERCASE
Almost never center
Usability
You have less than 2 minutes to communicate the
first time a prospective customer visits your Web
site. This is the basic fact about the Web
experience. As far as users are concerned, every
page must justify its claim on their time. If a page
doesn’t do that immediately and clearly, they go
elsewhere. Most don’t even bother scrolling to
see what’s further down the page.
Jacob Neilson
Navigation and Information
Architecture
• Old web – it is what it is and not open for
discussion (other than adding links to new
material in old material)
• New web - Staff will get an opportunity to
participate in improving the IA.
Obeying web conventions
• Most of this is handled by the templates or
themes, e.g. click on logo to get to home
page.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Searches rely heavily on the title, the H1 tag,
and the first paragraph of text. Use official
vocabulary words where possible in these.
Unwritten Conventions (1)
• There are two templates used, template which
has a left menu and leaf which does not.
• I never use font or font size commands and
almost never font color or background.
• I never use underline!
• I do use H3, H4, H5 and H6. In particular H3 is the
heading level for major subsections of a page. If
there are multiple of these on a page I usually use
template and put a menu item on it pointing to
the various subheadings.
• I frequently use tables to organize material
Unwritten Conventions (2)
• I use pictures sparingly and lately if there are
multiple pictures put them in the photo
gallery.
• I rarely use <br> (shift enter) except when
laying out an address block. Beware of these
when copy/pasting from external sources.
• I do not repurpose pages. If there are
significant changes I create a new page. I do
fix typos or errors in facts (and frequently note
the date of the change).
Unwritten Conventions (3)
• I do not duplicate material on several pages. If
this needs to happen I instead create a new
page with the material and point all other
pages to it.
• All dates include the year (unless it is explicitly
on a page dealing with a single year).
• I am almost religious about dating items, e.g.
the footer contains the last update date
(automatic).
Unwritten Conventions (4)
• I never use today, tomorrow or yesterday.
• I note significant changes in the new page (if
they don’t appear on the front page)
File Placement
• Many sections are isolated by year creating a
new directory each year effectively archiving
but retaining old pages.
• If sections have images, I usually create an
image subdirectory to contain them.
• I rarely delete or rename anything as this
breaks deep links on other sites and search
engines. When I need to I put in a transfer
page.