Website Publication Guidelines

When creating new pages for the Chapman website, using the new LiquidMatrix templates, please refer to the information in the following WORD documents:

Creating and editing pages (MS Word)
This document has screenshots and descriptions of all the steps you will go through to create, edit or publish a webpage using the LiquidMatrix Console. It uses the Law School website as an example but the same principals apply to all schools and departments at Chapman. If you have specific questions please contact the Webmaster.

Adding Built-In Features to your webpages (MS Word)
This document has sample code that you can copy/paste into your webpage to add things like Spotlights, Important Notes, News headlines, Featured Events, Quick Links, Banner ads etc. into your webpage.

Some additional do' and don'ts when creating webpages in the new templates:

1. Headings should be black, gray or maroon in H3 size for page headings and H4 size for section headings.
2. Don't set any font styles or sizes except to choose heading sizes from the drop-down menu. This will allow the site-wide stylesheets to set the same font style and size for all pages, giving the entire site some uniformity.Don't create or reference your own style sheets.
3. If you're copying content from a WORD document into your webpage we strongly recommend you copy it into a notepad file first, then copy and paste it again into your new webpage. You will need to add back in bolding etc. but it will be a lot cleaner HTML code as WORD puts a lot of extraneous html in the document and you will copy it into the new webpage if you go straight from WORD to the console.
4. Don't make any text RED in color as this is the color reserved for links. You'll notice the styles sheets automatically make links red with no-underline until you hover over the link.
5. Don't use underlines. If text is underlined users assume it is a link. Use bold or italic for emphasis instead.
6. Use the images from the Shared Media whenever possible rather than uploading a copy of a photo that's already on the website somewhere else.
7. If you upload your own image to a page it must already by cropped to 234 pixels in width (72 dpi) before uploading. You'll need a tool like Photoshop to resize it proportionally while preserving the quality. Don't upload a large photo then try to set the <img> tag width and height to something smaller than the photo actually is. This will result in a photo that looks jagged and distorted and will make your page slow to load, especially for dial-up users.
8. If you have a lot of text on a page convert the page from the default two-column layout to a one-column layout before adding any content.
9. If you add a photo or image underneath the links in the navigation area on the far left, it should be either a "cutaway" (no background, floating on white) or a rectangular banner ad (172 pixels wide maximum).
10. If you're linking to a page that's still on the old website and has not been converted yet. Refer to it with http://www1.chapman.edu in the URL rather than http://www.chapman.edu.