UoB - Developing a site within the university
Site development
So you want a website, or you want to make changes to an existing site.
How and where you can publish on university webservers depends on who
you are publishing for.
The Central Site
The central website, currently with the purple edging, is the official
online mouthpiece of the university. This is where the majority of visitors
enter the university so it is important that all information is accurate
and up-to-date.
Most administrative departments have some responsibility for the content
of individual sections within the main website. Registry, for instance,
is responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the courses database, whilst
International Relations manages the content on our pages for International
students. Accessibility is of vital importance on all our pages, but especially
so on the central site.
The webteam is responsible for all design and maintenance of pages on
the central site. If you have changes or spot any problems, please let
us know.
Schools and Departments
Almost every school has their own website, hosted on the main web servers.
The webteam is offering a redesign service allowing schools to redevelop
their existing sites, using our model template. This highly flexible template
adheres to the accessibility guidelines and can help to ensure that you
have considered all the content which a school site should include.
You can see examples of schools sites on
our projects page
If you decide to develop your site in-house, please contact us for some
basic guidelines and advice. If using an external developer, it is vital
that they are pointed to our standards for publication at the outset of
any contract to avoid the possibility of expensive rework. Most external
designers will want to be told of the technical constraints of their design
brief anyway.
Please report any plans to create, expand, substantially alter, reorganise
or abandon a Unit's web presence to the university webteam via email.
For further information contact the Webteam:
Projects and Campaigns
We manage and host websites for most of the student recruitment campaigns
or other educational projects.
e.g. www.brighton.ac.uk/arthouse
or www.brighton.ac.uk/stepup
Marketing and Communications offers a wide range of advisory services
for campaigns and we would urge you to contact us if you are considering
such a project. At the very least the webteam can offer advice to ensure
that your site adheres to the accessibility guidelines. If it doesn't
then, then under the new accessibility laws, we will not be able to host
it.
If you need to create a set of pages in support of a specific project,
please email us with the following information so we can find space to
host your site:
- Name, purpose and scope of the project
- Brief description of project
- Start date (NOT asap)
- Estimated life span
- Contact details for the web editor or person responsible for the site
- Who will be reasonable for the upkeep of the site
- The intended/desired domain name for the project
- Anticipated size of the site
- Information on any particular technologies which might be used
After this you will need to decide how to develop the site. You have
three options:
- Do it yourself - The webteam can provide templates, information and
advice on training
- Hire a developer - The webteam can help you find one, or can provide
your designer with the guidelines and minimum requirements documentation.
- Have us do it - Given enough warning, we can help on most projects.
Any new project, whether done by you or ourselves, should begin with
a discussion with Marketing and Communications and the webteam. We know
which routes to pass information through to IS and may well have previous
experience in the particular issues you are trying to address.
Once your site is published, we can promote and list your site on main
Site Map and Departments pages. We can also implement your pages within
the university search engine. If you are developing your own site or using
an outside contractor, we won't know to do this until you tell us. The
best bet is to send an email to webmaster@brighton.ac.uk
with the site's URL and information about the site's place in the hierarchy
(part of what department? is it a cross-department program or center?
etc.)
University Staff
Staff are entitled to 6Mb of space on our servers to host a personal
website. Please see the pages from Information Services for advice on
how to set up your
own site.
If you need a domain name please purchase one from a reputable provider
who should be able to offer you a free web forwarding facility. Whilst
we cannot recommend any specific provider, www.ukreg.com
offers a cheap and flexible solution for domain name forwarding.
Students
All students are entitled to 6Mb of space on our servers to host a personal
website. Please see the pages from Information Services for advice on
how to set up your
own site.
Please note that there are guidelines for acceptable use of this space.
Staffcentral
Staffcentral has been set up to become the central point of information
of interest for University of Brighton staff. If your site has more of
an targeted to an internal audience, it may be better to host it on the
staffcentral server. This will also allow you use PHP and other interactive
scripting technologies.
Staffcentral can be contacted through staffcentral@brighton.ac.uk
The main content on staffcentral is the university document archive,
which can be browsed or searched. staffcentral also has links to other
useful resources such as the central university calendar, the staff directory,
and news, weather and travel services.
The documents on staffcentral are published (think of it as electronic
filing) by nominated staff in each department or area. staffcentral is
developed and maintained by the Learning Technologies Group in Information
Services.
The UoB Intranet
UoB Intranet will remain available as a departmental private file store
for documents that are only relevant to your own department. University
documents will be transferred from UoB Intranet to staffcentral as it
provides a much easier and quicker way for people to find the document
they want without having to look in several places, staffcentral also
provides a useful way for the document publishers to keep track of the
latest version of a document and ensures safe, secure archiving.
All departments and areas have their own page on staffcentral that links
to their documents. If you already have an Internet or Intranet site,
you can add a link to these from your page, but if you do not have any
sites already, you can use this page to start developing your own resources
for your area.
All sites, hosted anywhere on university web servers must adhere to the
basic guidelines for content and accessibility.
Please note, university hosted websites can only ever be owned by current
university staff or students. The Standards for web publication on Brighton
University servers apply to all university hosted websites, whether hosted
on the central server or otherwise.
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