Content Guidelines

While content on the Lane website should target and be accessible to a wide variety of audiences, the primary audience for the www.lanecc.edu website is prospective students and community members. Where possible, content should be written with this audience in mind. Additionally, to make the text readable by the greatest number of people, where possible content should be written at a 6^th to 8^th grade reading level. We encourage you to use online tools to ensure your pages are readily understood.

The topics below go into detail about areas that are really important to keep in mind as you create and update your pages.

Targeted Audience

Be sure to make sure your content is relevant for current, future, or former students, community members, or contains content that must be present on a public website (for instance, a page that must be hosted under the requirements of a grant). Pages with a smaller target audience, such as employees, should instead be hosted on a wiki or blog. Please contact Lori Brenden for further clarification.

College Catalog

Having the college catalog on the web allows us to present official catalog material in an accurate and consistent way. To maintain the integrity of the college catalog as an official and legal college document, please follow these guidelines:

Do not duplicate or alter catalog information: link directly to the Online College Catalog. Either link our online catalog page, or link directly to the program pdf. If you are not sure how to link to a document in another deptartment's directory, contact the Web Team for assistance.
If you do list course descriptions or other catalog information, be sure to add a statement and link at the top of the information pointing the visitor to view the official catalog information in the online catalog. Example of wording for link: See the current class schedule for current classes and course descriptions
Send your catalog corrections to Craig Taylor, Institutional Research, Assessment and Planning. Some changes will take place the next printing of the catalog. Some may need Curriculum & Scheduling or Degree Review Committee approval. Changes in descriptive information must be approved by the department chair before being submitted to IRAP. If it affects the current school year, a note will be added next to the affected information on the website.
Contact Lori Brenden, Information Technology, (541) 463-3354 if you would like to use specialized links to list course descriptions. She will help provide customized links for your use.

Use of Headings

On the majority of webpages, the H2 heading is only used once, as the main heading for the page.
Headings must be used hierarchically, not to adjust text to be a certain size.

Information Redundancy

In order to keep information current and accurate, it's important to provide one location for information on the www.lanecc.edu website. The department that is responsible for the content will provide and maintain that content and other departments will briefly reference the content and then link to the page with the actual content.

Links

Lane's homepage is the first screen of information you see when you visit the college on the web. For consistency purposes when linking to this page, please refer to this page as the college's one and only "homepage." The first webpage for a college department should be labeled "main" page.

Email links must be to an LCC email account only. Please be sure that the email account will be checked frequently for incoming mail and that responses are sent in a timely manner.

When creating links to outside sites, web authors are responsible for clearly identifying the Internet location, respecting copyright or intellectual property rights and avoiding obscene or objectionable content.

Regularly Updated Content

Content left on the web goes stale if it isn't updated frequently. Be sure to regularly review your content so that outdated content is removed or updated and new information is added in a timely manner.

In order to keep your content fresh, please log in at least once every six months to do some maintenance to your pages. Accounts that have not logged in during the last six months will be deactivated. To reactivate your account, contact Lori Brenden to be reactivated and possibly repeat the training process.

Fonts

We have set the default fonts in the .css style sheets so there is no need to plan what font to use. Use the heading styles preset in the edit interface for section headings. Italics can be difficult to read on computer monitors, so use italics sparingly if at all.

Image Use

In addition to ensuring your images meet Accessibility requirements, you must also ensure:

You have permission to use the image
You have a release form for every person identifiable in the image
The image has been resized to the size you want to use on the web
Images and graphics should be of high quality, and free of any artifacts, watermarks, and artistic effects that do not contribute to the branding efforts of the college. Assistance with images and graphics is available. Please contact Lori Brenden with a description of what you'd like to do, whether its cleaning up an existing image, shooting new professional photography, or developing custom graphics, and she'll point you in the right direction.
That you do not use images in place of text for headings and if you use images for linking to documents or other pages, you must use a text link also.

File Names and References

When uploading files to Drupal, use only lowercase letters for all file/document names. Be as concise as possible and make good use of abbreviations. Do not use spaces, extra periods or odd characters such as & or *. Also, we will attempt to modify your filename automatically to remove punctuation and non ASCII letters. For example, the ñ will be replaced with an n and spaces in the name will be replaced with dashes -.

Guidelines for Staff Information

Simply stated, departments may choose to create staff pages, although the college does not support personal pages. Staff and personal pages are defined as follows:

Staff pages provide information related to the work and mission of the college.
Personal pages are pages with personal information that go beyond the work and mission of the college.

Here are the guidelines that apply to staff information on the web:

The Information Technology: Technology Use Rights and Responsibilities Policy prohibits the use of the college's computer resources for individual or private gain.
The department head is responsible for determining if the department wants staff pages and for observing the Computing and Networking Appropriate Use Policy. Staff pages tend to be of two types: a single page listing all department staff or a series of pages with one page per staff member. The committee recommends that staff information be presented in a consistent way within the department.
The college does not support personal pages, although at the department head's discretion, staff may link from a staff page on the server to a personal page on an off-campus server as long as the text for the link includes mentioning that the link is offsite.

Please remember: any pages created on Lane's server must be linked to an active page on Lane's website. Pages not pertaining to the work and mission of the college, such as pages of a personal nature, should not be on Lane's server.