Print

Policy 73

University of Wisconsin-Parkside
Web Policies
Policy #73

1.0 Introduction

The University of Wisconsin-Parkside 's website serves many communities, including prospective students and their families, current students and employees, alumni, and the local communities. A clear, consistent message used throughout each webpage in the UW-P site—a message which complements UW-P print publications—is vital to ensuring each UW-P website user has a positive experience. Without a consistent message in both information and design, users can become confused and frustrated. Each page in the site provides an opportunity to promote UW-P and its mission to a wider community. The goals outlined below are in place to help UW-P web authors present accurate, consistent and well-designed information on the UW-P website.

2.0 What pages or sites does this policy govern?

Web pages published to present official information about UW-P must conform to this policy. This includes sites published by UW-P academic and administrative departments, centers, committees and programs.

Pages used by individual members of the UW-P faculty as part of their teaching are considered academic pages . Faculty are encouraged to conform to this policy, though they are not required to do so.

Pages which present opinion or unofficial information about UW-P, including pages for individual faculty, student or staff members and student clubs and organizations are not required to conform to this policy. UW-P does not monitor or censor unofficial information; however, a disclaimer indicating that the content of an unofficial page is not sanctioned by the university is required on all unofficial pages.

The University of Wisconsin-Parkside reserves the right to remove content from the UW-P website which violates copyright laws, any local, state or federal laws or other official University policy.

3.0 Goals:

3.1. Publish accurate and reliable information about the university for which the publishing unit is directly responsible for maintaining.

3.1.1 Identification
UW-P website users rely on our pages for accurate information. They trust that we review our pages often and keep our information current. Finally, when users have a question, they must be able to find contact information for a person at UW-P by phone or e-mail who can provide them with help.

3.1.2  Structure
Information must be easily found and clearly labeled to be useful for our audience. UW-P web authors should plan a navigation structure that breaks information into logical groups with clear headers and titles, and provides links to other relevant information. Each sub-page should have a link to the site's main page, as well as to the UW-P homepage.

3.1.3  Site scope
UW-P webpages can be easily linked to other UW-P pages with related materials or resources produced in other academic or administrative departments. Web authors should publish only that information which their department or organization is directly responsible for maintaining and link to other sites where appropriate.

3.1.4  Reliability
Pages representing the university are the place for accurate, reliable university information. Personal opinions about the university, current events, other individuals, etc., may not be added to official university pages by page authors or publishing units. Exceptions include committee sites in which personal opinion is part of the recorded meeting minutes. In addition, web pages must be reviewed frequently to check for accurate information, broken links, etc.

3.1.5 Copyright
Although it is fairly easy to copy text or images from elsewhere on the web for use on a UW-P site, this should not be done without permission from the original site. Unless rights of use are clearly stated with the item used, assume all text and images on the web are protected by the U.S. Copyright Act and should not be reproduced without written permission from the copyright holder. See U.S. Copyright Act for information about “fair use” exceptions. See Frequently Asked Questions for help on general copyright questions.

3.2  Publish pages with common design elements that help our users navigate within the sites that make up the UW-P website as a whole.

3.2.1  Design
Each department and office at UW-P is unique; each has its own personality, mission and goals, and that uniqueness has a place in the department's website. However, people who visit the UW-P site may use many department and program sites, and it's vital to provide users with some standardization in design across all UW-P sites. UW-P web authors can accomplish this goal by using the university's web colors as the primary colors for the website, by incorporating the university logo prominently and properly, and by using standard navigation elements.

3.2.2 Readability
Web users, in general, do not read long paragraphs of information when browsing a site. UW-P web authors can increase the readability of their pages by using very short paragraphs, bulleted lists and active voice. Stale “boilerplate” welcome or mission statements should be kept to a minimum or moved away from the main page of a site.

3.3  Ensure all users can access UW-P information.

3.3.1 Accessibility
Web accessibility for all users, including those using screen readers and other assistive technology, is a priority for UW-P and the University of Wisconsin System . UW-P follows the standards defined by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), as well as the guidelines outlined in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act: Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards.

3.3.2 Servers
Pages representing official university departments and officially recognized student organizations must be hosted on one of the official university web servers. Official pages should not be hosted on a faculty or staff member's personal computer. The official university web servers are (in order of preference):
    - www.uwp.edu (the main and primary webserver)
    - uwp.edu (for special cgi and scripting needs)
    - dedicated departmental or functional servers, such as www.cs.uwp.edu or www.itpc.uwp.edu. Dedicated machines are eligible for an Internet Host Alias to meet this requirement.

4.0 Keyword Guidelines:

4.1 UW-P has the ability to create keywords as shortcuts to web materials. This allows a page with a ‘real' address such as www.uwp.edu/information.services/n.m.s/ to be advertised via a keyword in the form of www.uwp.edu Keyword: Networking. This not only results in a shorter address but also can eliminate much confusion when communicating a web address orally.

4.2 Requests for Keywords
The following guidelines apply to such keywords:

4.2.1 Academic Departments
All of the “department identifiers” in the course catalog and schedule will forward to the appropriate department. (eg. CSCI to Computer Science, FREN, GERM, SPAN all to Modern Languages)
All departments will have a “full department name” keyword assigned to their department (e.g. “Computer Science” or “History”). This full name will also be the department's entry into the UW-P A-Z Directory.
Any department offering a degree or certificate program with a name that differs from that of the department may have a keyword directed to that degree program's materials.

4.2.2 Administrative Departments
Any unit of UW-P down to the level of department/center/institute will have one such keyword directed to their home page.

4.2.3 Student Organizations
Any officially recognized student organization may have one keyword directed to their home page. (This can be requested through the Student Life Office.)  

4.2.4 All Keywords
The keyword chosen must be unique enough to unambiguously indicate the UW-P unit or program involved. Avoid acronyms or key words that are shared with other UW-P entities.
New keywords will only be created for pages that are fully in compliance with current campus standards outlined in this document.
Requests for keywords other than the above (e.g., for special publications or activities) will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Some criteria would be that there is a significant off-campus audience (e.g. such as IOI) and that the unit's own keyword would not be an appropriate route to the material. The material should also be designed to exist for a reasonable amount of time.
Requests for keywords may be e-mailed to the UWP webmaster < webmaster@uwp.edu >. To ensure authenticity, requests should originate from either unit's administrator or from the account owning its home page.

4.3 Keyword technical notes
Keywords will be targeted at a directory on the web server, not to an individual file . A keyword by itself is equivalent to accessing the index.html file in the target directory.
Note also that keywords are immediately redirected to the underlying ‘real' address. That is what the visitor will still see as their web location. If they book-mark the page, the real address is what is bookmarked.

5.0 Additional Applicable Policies and Documents

 

*Revised: Fall 2022

Scroll to top