Updated: April 2022
- Be realistic in what your department can maintain over the next 3-5 years and reduce your total number of pages accordingly.
- Try to trim the total number of pages on your site.
- Reduce and shorten the number of words you have on your pages. On the web, and especially on mobile, shorter is better.
- Refrain from creating pages or content that already exists elsewhere. If it’s already on www (maintained by Marketing) or in the Course Catalog or on myCampus, then you really don’t need to publish and maintain content others are already maintaining – just link to it.
- All pages and pdfs on the UMF website must be ADA accessible. This is a bigger deal than you may think.
- Add your department’s Contact Us info to the bottom of each of your pages.
- Whenever you publish an email address it must be a link to an email address.
- Linking to external-to-UMF websites? Proceed with caution.
- Need great images? Ask Marketing! Have great images? Tell Marketing!
- Linking to a pdf? Tell the visitor it’s a pdf.
- Linking to a Facebook page or other social media site? Tell the visitor this, too.
- Never use underlined text as a style treatment or design element anywhere on your page. Underlined text is always perceived as a link.
- Refrain from listing the graduation year of people on your pages, especially if the text describes her or him as “a current student” or “a recent grad.” They look outdated very quickly.
- Regarding tables: We strongly discourage using them.
- Refrain from publishing link descriptions and URLs.
- Reconsider displaying past events on your site. It’s rarely necessary.
- If editing your content or writing new content, speak in layman’s terms. Avoid acronyms, avoid jargon, avoid academ-ese, avoid UMF-isms. Make your content as understandable as possible.
- Be cautious in using student-workers as your in-house web team.
The Best Practices Explained
Is your UMF subsite really the best place to publish your information?
Keep in mind that our public website is primarily a student recruitment tool for prospective students and their families, secondarily for alumni and the general public.
Is your content primarily for current students or UMF employees? If yes, then your information instead reside on myCampus, the portal current UMF students and UMF employees use daily. UMF trains its students very early on (before Orientation) to stop relying on the public website and instead to use myCampus for everything. Once enrolled, current students rarely, if ever, visit the public website. Again, the public site primarily serves as a student recruitment tool.
This is not to say you shouldn’t build a subsite intended for current students on the public site. You can do this but you’ll need to have it linked and accessible via myCampus. Several UMF departments do exactly this. You’ll just have to let someone on the myCampus Committee know that you want your page to have a link to it from someplace on myCampus.
Is your content already exist in the UMF Catalog? If yes, why publish it again? We have seen this happen a lot.
Be realistic about what web content your department can maintain over the next 3-5 years and reduce your total number of pages accordingly.
Building new pages is easy and maybe even fun (OK, maybe not fun). But maintaining your all pages afterward is definitely not easy or fun.
Websites and department subsites are built with the best of intentions. Folks want to tell the world their entire story. We get that. Problem is, an overly-ambitious website can be a daunting task to maintain the second or third year after launching. We have seen this happen a lot.
We recommend building small and (only if necessary) ramping up bigger – but only build to what you can realistically maintain with your current staffing levels and staff workloads.
Try to trim the number of pages on your site.
Can you delete 10 of your pages? How about 20 pages? Can you combine 2-3 of your smaller pages into one longer page? It’s better to have 10 fantastic, informative, engaging pages than 50 short pages of lesser quality content.
And combining 2-4 short pages into a single longer page is entirely OK. This web design concept is called long scroll format (or infinite scroll) and has become popular thanks to social media sites like FB, Instagram, Pinterest and others.
Website visitors want to get to the info they need as quickly as possible, and a page with very little content is seen as a speed bump. Long scrolling to see your content, particularly in our site’s mobile-first design, is encouraged. Just use Heading 2 or Heading 3 to identify the beginning of content that previously appeared on a short, separate page.
Reduce and shorten the number of words you have on your pages. On the web, but especially on mobile, shorter is better.
By this, we mean shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs. Don’t say in 50 words what you can say in just 20. Brevity beats bloviating. Bulleted items beat lengthy paragraphs, dropdown FAQ accordions beat lengthy text passages. Make it easier (or make it look easier) for people to consume your great content. Short. Punchy. To the point.
Refrain from creating pages or content that already exists elsewhere.
We see this a lot. Save yourself some time and effort — check first to see if there is already a web page or web content on the marketing-maintained, www.umf.maine.edu site or in the UMF Course Catalog that’s similar to what you want to present: things like faculty rosters and biographies, national accolades, costs / expenses, institutional facts, directions to campus, campus map (pdf), campus events, course titles, course descriptions, specific (Catalog) policies, etc.
Don’t reinvent the wheel – instead, just link to those pages. Remember, too, in many instances those are often pages visitors had visited on their way to yours, so they may have just seen that content and you don’t need to provide it a second time.
All pages on the UMF website must be ADA accessible. This is a bigger deal than you may think.
UMaine System policy insists that all University web pages must be accessible to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and rightfully so.
The good news: All the words on your web page are accessible; there’s nothing you need to do to the text.
The trickier news: There are other items on your page that you will need to make ADA accessible prior to launch: every image, every graphic, every pdf, every table.
We can show you how to make the images and graphics on your pages accessible. It’s a bit of a process, but a necessary one for you to do.
And speaking of ADA accessibility …
All pdfs must be ADA compliant. If you must have pdfs on your web pages then you must run them through the Adobe Acrobat accessibility tool and correct any issues outlined. Be aware, this is not a particularly easy task. UMF Marketing & Communications, nor System IT, is responsible for making folks’ pdfs accessible — that’s the responsibility of the subsite owner. And it’s difficult, especially on longer pdfs with tables and graphics.
Another option is to work with a third-party vendor to have it professionally altered to meet ADA standards. The company below is already in Marketplace, should you require professional assistance.
www.appligent.com
Appligent Document Solutions
22 East Baltimore Avenue
Lansdowne, PA 19050
tel 610-284-4006
Add your department’s Contact Us info to the bottom of each of your pages.
This is a basic web design Best Practice and it’s a simple copy & paste. For consistency, please arrange it in this order on one page, then copy & paste it to the bottom of all your pages:
Contact Us (using Heading 3)
Department Name (using bold)
University of Maine at Farmington
Mailing address or use 111 South Street
Farmington, Maine 04938
tel 207-778-xxxx
TYY (via Maine Relay Service) dial 711
person.name@maine.edu or something like finaid@maine.edu
The phone number you publish should be one that is checked regularly for messages. It can be an office landline phone number or a cell number. Always include the area code.
Use the email address of at least one person in your department or if your department has a custom email address, ie. finaid@maine.edu, use that instead.
Whenever you publish an email address it must be a link to an email address.
Related to the above, every time you publish an email address it must be a link. This is another web design Best Practice and is simple to do.
Linking to external-to-UMF websites? Proceed with caution.
Simply said, the more external-to-UMF links you publish, the more frequently you’ll need to test the links to see if they still work. Websites, especially government, non-profit, media and education sites — even UMF’s website, change URLs very frequently, meaning your once-helpful external links turn into 404 Error – Page Not Found errors.
This happens more often than you realize, and you’ll seldom be told your site has a dead link. We recommend linking to external sites a lot less frequently than you may be used to.
Linking to a pdf? Tell the visitor this.
Website visitors should know in advance what they’re being asked to click on – always.
Why? The pdf may not open properly on the device the visitor is using and could temporarily lock up / freeze up their device. The description of the link should look something like this:
Declaration of Finances Form (pdf) or George Mitchell Peace Scholarship Application (pdf)
Linking to a Facebook page? Tell the visitor this, too.
Website visitors should know in advance what they’re being asked to click on – always.
Why? Besides the fact that few high schoolers are active Facebook users, many high schools have security proxies on their school laptops to block Facebook and other social media access.
Also, the number of active user HS-aged Facebook users is small and shrinking. Facebook acknowledges this, market research backs this up. High schoolers may have a FB account but they don’t use it. To them, FB is the place their teachers and parents and aunties and uncles hang out. Gross.
In addition, with more and more website visits coming from mobile devices, a Facebook link launches the user’s Facebook app – which means the visitor may take a lengthy detour to the time-suck that is Facebook … never to return to your spectacular web page.
If, after all that you still want to link to a Facebook page, the link description should look something like this: Engineering Program Facebook page or Engineering Program FB page
Need great images? Ask Marketing! Have great images? Tell Marketing!
We maintain an extensive Photo Bank of images and we’re happy to share. We’ve even got a folder of images pre-cropped and Photoshopped to the website’s specific Featured Image dimensions (1170w x 500h). The “For Departments” Photo Library is still under construction but can be accessed with the password: umf.websites
If you don’t see exactly what you’re looking for there, ask us and we’ll see if it exists in our always growing Photo Bank.
If you’ve shot or obtained great images, we’d love to see them!
We especially want to show prospective students the kinds of interesting things students do in your program: field trips, internships, volunteerism, other experiential learning, undergrad research, conference participation, on-campus activities, off-campus activities and more. We absolutely want to consider these images for use on the website and elsewhere. Let’s collaborate on this!
By the way, most smartphones shoot images of a quality suitable for the web. If you or your students shoot, please, please, please shoot images horizontally. The web is primarily a horizontal platform and vertical / portrait-shot images almost never work for our website.
So turn that phone sideways and shoot away!
Never use underlined text anywhere on your page.
The web is all about User Experience and User Expectations. Website users expect that the only thing they will encounter in underlined text is a link. Underlined text should never be used as a graphic embellishment or design treatment on the web.
Our WordPress theme automatically underlines links. And we purposely disabled the Underline option for WordPress subsites but we know they can be hard-coded in. (Please don’t do that.)
Refrain from publishing the graduation year of people your page describes as “a current student” or “a recent grad.” They look outdated very quickly.
To high schoolers, anyone who graduated from college when they were in middle school is super old. Do the math … our Fall 2022 First Year students were in 6th grade in 2012. To them, a 2012 graduate is not “recent,” it’s a million years ago. Most times, it’s best to not even mention the UMF students’ year of graduation — leaving it out keeps the content looking fresher, longer. For marketing purposes, there is rarely a benefit in publishing someone’s year of graduation.
Using tables on your page? We strongly discourage it.
Tables are rarely ADA accessible, they’re very difficult to make ADA accessible and seldom display properly in the www theme. More importantly, tables almost always malfunction in mobile. Our website was designed with a mobile-first goal so we strongly urge you not to use tables.
Refrain from publishing lengthy link references.
By this, we mean, instead of writing something like,
Click this Veteran’s Benefits link to see more, https://www.maine.gov/veterans/benefits/index.html
just tighten that up and just make the name of the page a click-through, like this:
See Veterans Benefits
This is pretty straightforward and very easy to do.
Reconsider displaying past events on your site. It’s rarely necessary.
There is rarely a good reason to display past events. Website visitors typically seek upcoming and current events, not archives of bygone events.
Our Google analytics and focus groups have shown pages containing archived events rarely get visited — and prospective students don’t look at them. Ever.
If, for some reason, you absolutely must list past events, use chronological order – newest to oldest.
People quickly browse the web rather than read the web like a book. If they see a 2010 event listed at the top of your page they will not scroll or swipe down in the hopes of finding something newer below it. Instead they’ll quickly bail from your page. (Google analytics show this, too.)
When writing content for your pages, speak in layman’s terms.
Avoid acronyms, avoid jargon, avoid academ-ese. Make it as understandable as possible. Our website’s primary audience is prospective students and their parents, secondarily the general public. So use terms and language they use and understand.
Your overall goal should be to inform and communicate effectively. If you write conversationally and in layman’s terms, more people will understand you. Writing for the masses should be your communications goal; newspapers, magazines and effective websites all understand and practice this.
About acronyms and UMF-isms: Few people outside of UMF know what an “FRC” is. Even fewer will know what you mean by (on first reference): SC, ECAC, SSC, ALC, ACE; or for that matter, Roberts, Merrill, Mantor, Olsen, Fusion, Emery, Thomas, Lincoln. Instead, always write it out fully on first reference: Fitness & Recreation Center, Olsen Student Center, Emery Community Arts Center, Student Success Center, Roberts Learning Center, Merrill Hall, Thomas Auditorium, Lincoln Auditorium, etc. If you must use an acronym, put it in parentheses immediately afterward: Fitness & Recreation Center (FRC), Olsen Student Center (SC), Emery Community Arts Center (ECAC), etc.
Don’t use student-workers as your sole or primary in-house web editor.
Using student-workers to update your subsite is not inherently a bad idea. But if you rely solely on a student to do it, their expertise and knowledge base leaves your dept. when they leave UMF. This practice has rendered many administrative and academic departments unable to maintain its own page when their web-savvy student has graduated. We’ve seen this happen many times.
But if an employee in your department can maintain your WordPress site, that staff person will be able to train your current and future students for years to come.
Please note: For many reasons, Marketing does not train students to maintain departments’ web pages. We do not have the time or staffing bandwidth to do so. IT stopped the practice of training students to work on departmental sites many years ago and it was a wise decision.
Contact Us (Me)
If you have questions or want additional info, please contact me.
Tom Donaghue
Marketing & Communications (and web)
donaghue@maine.edu