Policies
The following guidelines have been developed by the Office of Communications to support and maintain the integrity of Puget Sound’s institutional web presence. Please contact the Web Manager for additional information.
- Website Guide (www.pugetsound.edu/websiteguide)
The Website Guide is aresource for campus content providers and includes training documentation, how-to guides, contacts, and style guide information. - Third Party URLs
External URLs (for example: universitycommunications.com or slatermuseum.org) should not be created. The university’s web presence is identified as pugetsound.edu and the development of multiple external URLs dilutes the university’s identity and makes it more difficult for users to remember and find. - Third Level URLs
Third level URLs (such as library.pugetsound.edu) must be approved by the Web Manager in consulatation with the Web Strategy Group. - Hosting of External Sites
Short-term hosting of external sites, such as those developed for conferences hosted by Puget Sound, is permitted. Long-term hosting of web presences for outside organizations is strongly discouraged. - Faculty Pages and Sites
A faculty page is developed for every full-time faculty member (and selected adjunct faculty members) and is supported by academic department support staff. These pages will host basic information about faculty members, including a brief biography, contact information, educational information, and an optional photo. Faculty course information will appear either on a faculty site or a course management site (e.g., Moodle).
Faculty sites may be maintained by the faculty member, academic department support staff, or the Educational Technology team in Technology Services. These sites are optional; faculty are not required to maintain a site. Site content is up to the discretion of the faculty member, but could include course information (which should no longer be hosted on faculty pages). These faculty sites may be hosted inside the university content management system or outside the CMS using a web editor such as Dreamweaver and a file transfer protocol such as ftp.
Faculty sites hosted outside the Puget Sound content management system should not mimic or attempt to recreate the institutional Web design, although sites may use a similar color palette or type fonts. - Jurisdiction of Institutional Web Content
All content related to university functions that is not a faculty site, an ASUPS site, or an external system should be maintained within the institutional site’s CMS. This includes sites for all academic departments and programs. Departments may elect to keep their own servers for departmental use, but primary academic department sites are to remain in the CMS.
This policy is designed to maintain a cohesive look-and-feel, as well as unifying functionality across all areas of the institutional website, and to make it clear to users that they are viewing official content that can be trusted and shared. The cohesive site design is intended to reinforce that Puget Sound is a small liberal arts college, and not a comprehensive university comprised of separate schools. -
Matching the University Website Design
Departments working with external vendor products should not attempt to match the design of the university website structure without consulting the university Web Manager, in order to avoid issues that impact the overall site and the user experience. -
Using University Identity Elements
Departments working with external vendor products should contact the university Design Director or Web Manager to ensure the university's identity components are handled appropriately (e.g., workmark files, etc.).
