Chapman University - Policies - Website Publication Standards

Policies > Website Publication Standards > Personal Pages IS&T

To create a personal website, first create a directory named "public_html" in your home direcotry on the server www1.chapman.edu. There are many ways to do this. (One way is to use an FTP program such as WS_FTP to connect to the www1.chapman.edu. You will be placed in your home directory on the server. Click the "MkDir" button on the right side to run the "Make Directory" command and then type "puiblic_html" as the name of the direcotry to be created) Files for your personal website must be placed in the "public_html" directory. The public_html directory and every subdirectory of that directory must contain a file with the name "index.html". Your personal website may be accessed thorugh a URL of the form /~username where "username" is replaced by the your actual Chapman username.
Links should be relative. In other words, don't include the http://www.chapman.edu in your links. This makes your site more portable if we have more than one webserver in the future.
File names should:

consist of all lower case characters or digits (the webserver is case-sensitive)
contain no spaces or symbols
HTML files should end in the extension ".html"

Your website directory, and each subdirectory, or folder, on your website should contain:
1. a file by the name of "index.html" which will is the default page for that directory
2. it is also recommended that you have:
  1. a "css" directory which contains any style sheets for your site
  2. an "images" directory which contains all images common to your site
  3. an "ssi" directory which contains any "server side include" files
The index.html (homepage) should contain links to all the HTML files and subdirectories of that directory.
Each page on your website, other than the index.html file itself, should:

contain a link to the homepage for the site
if your site has subdirectories, each page in that subdirectory should also contain a link to the index.html in that subdirectory.

Official Information:
There are a number of pages on the Chapman website which contain official university information. Other pages should not duplicate this information, but instead should include hyperlinks to the information when necessary. Examples include:

The font used in the Chapman University letterhead is Palatino (MAC) or Palatia (Windows). If the phrase "Chapman University" appears in a banner or image on a webpage, this font should be used when creating the image.
For text on the page, use the following in a stylesheet, or better yet, refer to the Chapman style sheet (see below) rather than hardcoding any font settings in your html:
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
font-size: 12px

A Chapman style sheet is available for your use. To add it to your page, include the following code inside the <HEAD></HEAD> tags of your html: <link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/chapman.css">
If you'd like to add additional style sheet elements to your pages, create one and put it in a css folder under your website. In your html for each page, you should have 2 links in the <HEAD> tags, one to the Chapman style sheet followed by another to yours. For example:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/chapman.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/mysite/css/style1.css"

The Chapman school colors are "cardinal (red) and gray". Use these colors where appropriate. The publications office uses Pantone 200 for "cardinal". The closest hexidecimal equivalent for use on your webpages is #EE0000
The background color or background image for a page should be chosen to enhance the readability of the page, but not distract. In general, white is preferred.

Pages should be developed to look best at 800x600 screen resolution, but must still work correctly at 640x480 screen resolution (i.e. objects or links shouldn't be off the page with no scrollbars to reach them).

Direct any questions to the webmaster in the Information Systems and Technology Department.