Websites

Purpose & Audience

Official USNH Websites

The purpose of USNH websites is to provide USNH colleges, schools, departments, offices, services and other organizations with USNH-branded, USNH-affiliated websites on a university system server. USNH Enterprise Technology & Services (ET&S) offers site design, development, guidelines, training and ongoing support to set up and maintain USNH Drupal websites.

When you request a website, ET&S works with you through the whole process, from consultation, budgeting and planning to development and delivery and beyond, to ongoing support and maintenance. After consultation, if it’s determined that an outside vendor should create the site or application, ET&S will help you with that process.

To set up a USNH Drupal website, the following criteria must be met:

• USNH staff or faculty must request/sponsor a site for a department or organization with demonstrated need.
• Either no site currently exists where the material can be posted or a parent site exists under which the new site can be posted.
• No existing site/application exists that covers the same material or offers the same functionality.

Personal Websites

Personal websites are created by members of the University community acting as individuals rather than as official representatives of the University of New Hampshire.  As such, this service is not to be used as the official website for any UNH college, school, institute, department, or administrative or service unit. 

Site owners may elect to grant editing and other content creation and management rights to any other individual with a USNH account. Site owners, however, will ultimately be responsible for the site and its contents. 

Authors of these pages are responsible for complying with all relevant laws, university policies, and this Standard. 

Manager and editor accounts remain active for 1 year. If an account hasn’t logged in in a year, it may be disabled. To reactivate the account, fill out a support request form and update your mySites training.

If no edits have been made to a USNH mySites website in 18 months, email notifications may be sent to the site owner. After notification, the owner will have 30 days to log in to the site, or it will be unpublished. Owners can request that the site be republished. If it is not republished, the site will be deleted after 1 year. Notification will be sent prior to any deletion. 

Testing, security and compliance requirements

• Testing - Whenever new content is added to a site, it is the content editor’s responsibility to test for:
  • Mobile responsiveness
  • ADA compliance
  • Browser compatibility
• Security
  • Website administrators must comply with all university system data security policies.
• Policy compliance - Website administrators are required to adhere to all university policies, including: 
  • ADA compliance
  • Privacy
  • Copyright compliance (must have permission to use photos and videos)
  • Other USNH policy compliance

Content requirements

• Branding, logos, fonts and colors
  • Websites should comply with all digital branding, logos, fonts and colors standards. Information about these standards is provided by each College or University's marketing department.
    • Keene Marketing & Communications
    • Plymouth Communications & Marketing
    • UNH Marketing
• Site navigation
  • Website menus should be used only for navigation within the site except in certain specific circumstances. Please see the standard on site navigation for more information.
• Imagery and video
  • University system approved high-quality photograph and video resources are available for use on your website.
    • Keene State College
      • KSC Photography Resources
      • KSC Video Resources
      • KSC Marketing and Communications SharePoint
    • Plymouth State University
      • PSU SmugMug
    • UNH ResourceSpace
    • UNH Flickr
    • UNH YouTube
    • MediaSpace:
      • PSU
      • UNH
  • All media should be in the correct format and size
  • Do not add text to an image file, add it in Drupal instead. When placing text over an image, the contrast needs to be high enough to allow the text to be easily read. Select photos that have clear areas for text, typically darker since text is usually white. This helps make the text legible and ADA-compliant.
  • All images must have alt text, a simple text description of the image, in order to be ADA-compliant. Alt-text also provides additional information to search engines, improving the SEO of the page.
  • All imagery and video used on websites should comply with all copyright and permissions restrictions.
  • Image galleries - Images convey visual impact and excitement for website visitors. Too many images can diminish the user experience, slowing down the load time of a webpage. 
    • Include only selective, high-quality, impactful images that help the mission of the page
    • Use a maximum of 1 page with maximum 12 images
    • Avoid repetitious or low-quality images
    • Use social media to share events or other images of interest to your specific audience
    • Add newsworthy stories and images to the institution’s news publishing platform
    • Store additional photos in Sharepoint, using "Share folder with anyone with the link"
• Webforms
  • Webform editors must follow university system policies for collecting, using and retaining personal information.
  • See the webform standard for additional webform guidelines and practices 
• .pdfs
  • .pdfs should only be included in a website if they are appropriate for the general public or legally required to be visible on the website.
  • If the material is important, create a webpage instead.
  • If the .pdf is a form or document for current students, faculty or staff only, store it in SharePoint and create a task for it in the student portal instead.
  • .pdfs should be accessible
    • .pdf accessibility techniques for WCAG2.0
• Editorial - Content editors should familiarize themselves with guidelines for writing for the web.
• Accuracy - Content should not be duplicated on your own site or from other sites  Websites should always link to or ingest from the “single source of truth." For more detailed information, see the standard about approved single sources of truth and embedded content.
• Review schedules - Website administrators are responsible for keeping their pages updated and accurate and should establish review schedules:
  • Static content, or content that rarely is changed, should be reviewed annually. This includes high-quality images that may be placed in prominent positions on a site.
  • Time-sensitive content, or content that requires frequent updates, should be reviewed according to the related expiration date, no less than once a semester. Event listings or announcements, for example, should be updated immediately as events expire.
  • Webforms should be reviewed at least twice a year to make sure the form is working correctly, the correct person is receiving the form information, and that the data is being stored or removed as needed.
  • Out-of-date content should be deleted or archived. This includes events that have passed, news that is no longer relevant, or information that is outdated. Materials such as news stories, press releases and newsletters should only date back five years.
  • All content should be reviewed periodically for broken links, spelling errors, and ADA compliance.
  • Pages that have not been visited in the past 18 months should be removed.
• Additional approved tools - These approved tools can be incorporated into your Drupal site:
  • Social media
  • Google analytics to monitor site usage

Support

Sites@USNH, Domain of One's Own and Pressbooks are offered as self-service tools. For support needs please contact ET&S or attend a virtual walk-in session

Archiving

USNH Faculty & Staff sites are not archived. Individuals are responsible for backing up any website content that they post or remove. 

If no edits have been made to a Sites@USNH or Domain of One's Own website in a year, email notifications may be sent to the site owner. After notification, the owner will have 30 days to log into the site, or the site will be unpublished. Notification emails will be sent out prior to the site being unpublished. 

Violations

Although USNH ET&S does not monitor or regularly review standalone site content, it reserves the right to remove at any time any content that it considers to violate this standard or any other USNH policies.  

If inappropriate or inaccurate content is discovered, ET&S will contact the site owner to discuss the issue. If the site or content owner cannot be contacted or is no longer at USNH, that content will be administered by ET&S and can be removed if deemed inaccurate or inappropriate. When content is obviously unacceptable, ET&S will immediately remove the content prior to contacting the site owner. Unacceptable entries also may cause site access to be suspended.

Reports regarding inappropriate content may be sent to ET&S.