Library Website Standards/Guidelines

Standards

The following standards were approved by the Web Implementation Group. These and subsequent standards shall apply to all directories, sub-directories and files created after November 13, 2002.

Copyright statement
All HTML files shall include the copyright statement:

Copyright © YYYY The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

File Structure by type
If applicable, each directory shall contain the following sub-directories:

  • docs
  • forms
  • images
  • media
  • pdfs
  • styles
  • xls
  • xtrafiles

Melvyl
Pages with significant Melvyl-related content should include the full trademark statement somewhere on the page: "Melvyl® is a registered trademark of The Regents of the University of California."

Other than that, the ® is not required next to the word "Melvyl" and should be edited out as pages are updated.

Metadata
All HTML files shall contain "keyword," "description" and "author" meta tags.
[Examples of meta tags]

Tags

  • If possible, the <title> tag shall follow the pattern: Subject-Library or Library Unit-Campus.
    Example: Research Guides-Teaching Library-University of California, Berkeley
  • All tags shall be lower case and have ending tags.
  • All tag attributes shall be enclosed in quotation marks.
  • All image tags in a web page are required by Section 508 to include an alt text attribute.

URLs

  • ".html" shall be the extension used for all static HTML files.
  • Lower case letters shall be used for all directory, sub-directory and file names.
  • Underscores shall be used to separate words in a file name if needed.
  • URLs shall be less than 78 characters.
  • URLs shall not contain the special characters %, *, &, #, !

Guidelines

The following guidelines are recommended by the Library Web Services Manager and the Web Advisory Group (WAG).