Best Practices

Overview

Worried that visitors to your website aren’t finding what they’re looking for? Or that your site feels too busy – or maybe not busy enough? ITS and the Communications Office have assembled a short guide to help ensure you use best practices and avoid common pitfalls of website development.

Page Title

• All pages should have a title that clearly states the general topics covered within.

Text

• Headings 1 – 6 should be used consistently to organize and format headings on pages.

• Paragraph style should be used for "regular" body text.

Images

• Be sure to follow the Recommended Image Size guide when preparing images for upload.

• Avoid using images containing text.

• Each department homepage should have one or more images that convey something meaningful about the department.

• The top pages of your navigation should include a Primary Image as well.

Alternative Text for Images

• Learn more about Alternative Text at WebAim.

• Images should include brief descriptions in the Alternative Text field. This is extremely important in providing context in instances where a visitor is making use of assistive technologies.

• Images featuring people should also include their name in the Alternative Text field.

• Descriptive text MUST be included when images containing meaningful information are added to a page. 

Links

• Links to external sites, meaning sites outside of the swarthmore.edu domain, should always open in a new window.

  • Target field should be set to New Window.

  • Title field should indicate  "New window, [external site's name]”.

• Always provide informative link text. Example:

  • "Learn more about [link topic]" 

• Never use ambiguous link text. Example include:

  • "Click Here"

  • "Here"

  • "More"

Navigation and Contact Us

• Departmental sites should include a Primary Navigation and Contact Information module on every page.

• The primary navigation should always appear at the top and Contact Us should always appear at the bottom right.

News and Events

• Each department homepage should include a news pane and an events/calendar pane. 

Swarthmore College Style Guide

• Be sure to follow the Swarthmore College Style Guide when writing text for your site.

Student Workers

• Always provide student workers with specific instructions for site updates and double-check their work. You are responsible for their work as it appears on the Swarthmore website.