Site Design and Maintenance

Department of Education and Training - Design Guideline

The Department of Education and Training and the Queensland Government provide standards for website designers. Although these standards are mandatory for sites developed for the EQ Internet or Intranet site, they also provide a good guide for schools to ensure the site looks good and is easy to use.

The guidelines are based on the Smart Service Queensland Consistent User Experience , which is designed to enable visitors to Queensland Government websites to find the information and services they need more easily and navigate from one site to another with familiarity.

Best Practice

School websites should be designed for maximum accessibility for all groups in the community. Design your site to cater for:

People with disabilities
Users with slow Internet access or older browsers

For example:

A website with many large graphics will download slowly for users who do not have a fast connection
If you don't provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., no "alt" description for images, or text that is only visible in an image) your site will become inaccessible to people with certain visual impairments

Ideally, school websites should comply with the accessibility requirements of Queensland Government Information Standard 26 (IS26) .

As a minimum you should:

Provide "alt" text for all significant images, especially images that contain text instructions (eg: navigation buttons)
Use background patterns and colour that contrast well with the lettering to maintain readability. Dark text on light background is recommended. Colour combinations should not disadvantage visually impaired or colour-blind people;
Ensure that any information conveyed using colour also makes sense without the colours
Avoid the use of frames
Optimise images to make the file size as small as possible and speed up download times (the default settings on a digital camera create images much larger than required for the web)

You should also:

Have clear navigation. A visitor should be able to determine how they can get back to the homepage from another page within the site. Navigation also serves to give a visitor an indication of what sort of information they can expect to find on your site
Be able to view the site at 800 x 600 screen resolution without the need to scroll horizontally
Name files with logical filenames. Use all lowercase and don't use spaces, special characters (like & * ! @ etc) or underscores
Use meaningful page titles (the page title appears on the blue title bar at the top of the browser)
Use commonly available fonts. A font designed for reading on screen, such as Verdana, is recommended but san serif fonts such as Arial and Helvetica are also effective
Use consistent link colours and choose a logical link word or phrase from the text, rather then "Click here". Avoid underlining text that is not a link
Provide an indication of document size to your audience, if linking to an non-HTML document such as a PDF or Microsoft � Word document. This particularly applies to larger file sizes (i.e. over 50kb). For example: [PDF 55kb];
Break up large documents into logical sections. Try to limit pages to 5 screens maximum (use the "Page Down" key to check)
Use thumbnails to link to large images. Image width and height should always be specified and images should be no larger than 30kb
Use audio and video sparingly. Never use audio or video as the sole means of communicating important information
Avoid unnecessary HTML code (Don't use MS Word to create HTML)
Test your site for compatibility with all major browsers, including version 4 and above of Internet Explorer and Mozilla.

Other resources: Smart Service Queensland - Consistent User Experience

Quality Control

Your school website is one of the ways your school is represented in the community.

Web publishers should regularly check that:

Links are correct
Links are to existing content on other sites rather than duplicating the information on the school's web page
Out-of-date information is removed or updated
The integrity of the data is maintained. Schools should maintain their own data accurately e.g. phone numbers, dates of events, names of staff members, etc.
Information is syntactically and grammatically correct
Design and format problems are not compromising the meaning of the content (e.g. misaligned table cells)
Cosmetic flaws are minimised (e.g. inconsistent use of italics, missing punctuation)

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