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Several people have asked us to define rules for developing Websites in the County. We don't want to do this because we feel: - It may unnecessarily stifle ideas.
- We would feel obliged to provide support to people following the rules - as volunteers, we cannot guarantee we would be able to do that.
- Rules would need to be enforced, which we don't have sufficient time to do effectively.
Note: We do strongly urge people developing sites for County-level events, teams or projects to contact the Website team before starting. However, we do have the recommendations below. We hope that you will agree that these are sensible, and will benefit you and - most importantly - the users of your sites: - Ensure you have read the national guidelines.
- For most situations, they are a sensible set of rules to abide by.
- See factsheet FS295207 'Developing a Scouting Website' in the Scoutbase library.
- Please carefully read the sections about identifying young people, and meetings and events.
- Please note that whilst it is very important that exact details of events should not be published, there is some scope for basic details of events (and importantly, the ability for a reader to request more information). Also, there are many solutions for restricting access to resources that require little technical knowledge, so it may be worth assessing these. Also, do remember that mediums such as e-mail (and even posted mail for that matter) are not actually secure.
- Hosting issues.
- In many cases, free hosting will be adequate, such as that provided by your ISP.
These free packages rarely provide programming facilites, but will be sufficient for many basic sites. - If you need more advanced facilites http://www.escouts.org.uk/ is always worth a look as they often offer free hosting for Scouts.
- For County-level Websites (e.g. County clubs, or a temporary site for an event), contact us, and we may be able to help you.
- We encourage you to avoid using hosting that introduces pop-up adverts that you don't control - we have seen adverts for casino's on Scouting sites which doesn't seem appropriate.
- Domains.
- It may be worth buying your own domain. At most, this will cost ?10 for two years - often less. This also allows some consistency for URL and e-mail address if you move your site to a different host. Also, it will usually be easier for users to remember.
- For Groups and Districts we would advocate a domain of the form www.scouts-[groupname].org.uk or www.[groupname]-scouts.org.uk however there is already a great deal of variety so it is a bit late to apply standards. You ought to use .org.uk rather than .co.uk or .com though.
- When buying a domain check in the small-print that you are the owner of the domain. Historically, some companies offering 'free' services have applied heavy fees if you wanted to move the domain at a later date, as they were actually the official owner.
- Note: If you are a County team/project considering purchasing a domain, it is essential that you contact the Website team first.
- Do not copy content.
- Do not simply copy content from other sites - whether Scoutbase, Hampshire Scouting, or any other sites.
- Certainly highlight things that you have found useful elsewhere, but link to the original source, not a local copy.
- This has the added advantage of you not having to try to keep that information up to date, e.g. a revised Factsheet being issued.
- Develop the core site in HTML.
- If you're a Flash/Director expert, it may be tempting to do the whole site in Flash or Director.
Unfortunately, some people do not have this, or do not want it. - Ensure that Flash is only used to enhance your site, not to provide core functionality or content.
- Accessibility.
- Don't forget that people are different and computers are set-up differently! A few simple steps will help the vast majority of people:
- Try and avoid fixing your site to a certain size if you can. If possible, have it flow to the width of the browser like this site and various 'big' sites like Amazon do.
Whilst assuming "800x600 is good for everybody" may have certain good points, there are a lot (and I mean a lot) of people out there with bigger monitors. You may also alienate us by wasting all that extra space! - Avoid fixing font sizes. Depending on how you specify your text, it may not resize properly in Internet Explorer. Try using the menus, and going View -> Text Size -> Largest and see if it works. You may think this does not matter, but find someone who is long-sighted and they will tell you otherwise!
- Avoid making too many parts of the site images. Not only do images take a while to load, but they also do not resize. See #2. Also, you will spend so much time fiddling around whenever yoy need to change things - it's amazing how much can be done with text and coloured blocks. Again, see Amazon where all of their side-navigation is text-based.
- When you do use graphics, make sure you supply ALT tags. These are what are displayed for people who can't see the images. Also, they are what the search engine sees, and what people with slow connections see if they block big images.
- Avoid automatic pop-up windows.
- If when visiting your site, it automatically launches in a new window, many users may not be able to get your site to work.
With so many pop-up blockers in circulation, you risk people not being able to see your whole site.
- Test your site.
- Remember that not everyone has Internet Explorer. We appreciate that it will take a lot of time to test your site on all permutations of browser and operating system, but we would encourage you to at least test your site in one other browser (e.g. Mozilla Firefox) as that will often highlight any major problems.
- We suggest ensuring all (or at least most) of your site is compliant with standards. Not just because it is good practice, but it will probably help spot any issues which may cause display issues for some users. Check it on http://validator.w3.org/.
- Old sites or out-of-date sites.
- If for any reason you decide to discontinue your site, we would urge you to remove it.
- Out-of-date sites can be very misleading to readers, and difficult to remove.
When setting up a new site, it is always a good idea to ensure that at least two different people know how to update it, just-in-case one party leaves.
- File sizes.
- There are plenty of people still on dial-up connections. Please be considerate to them and ensure that files are kept to a minimum. At the very least, large files (in particular images within pages) should be optional downloads.
- Nobody wants to wait for a 700kB image as part of your homepage, when a 40kB equivalent would be sufficient.
- However, if you have interesting content that genuinely needs to be large for whatever reasons, then don't feel put off - do provide it - connection speeds keep getting faster, and the more information we share the better... just ensure we're warned how big it is first!
- Regularly check links.
- Many sites regularly move their content around, or change their address. Please check your links (internal and external) at least a couple of times a year to minimise broken links. There are tools out there to help automate this.
- Contacts.
- Ensure that a means of contacting the organisation represented by your Website is clearly labelled.
- To avoid confusion, many people advocate just one person as the main contact who then forwards all requests on rather than providing lots of e-mail addresses. Due to problems with spam, many people don't want to list their e-mail address - in which case, please consider some sort of contact form (or even just a telephone number).
- Consider linking to Hampshire Scouting.
- We're not just trying to unduly promote ourselves (!), but we would encourage Websites to link to the County site or their District Website where appropriate. Any non-Scouters who may come across your site (potential members, sponsors, press, etc.) may be seeking general information which we may be in a better position to supply
- Graphic design.
Unfortunately we don't have the time to help Groups develop sites, but if you have any particular concerns, please get in touch, and we will try and offer some advice. For general Web development advice, the Escouts forums are a good place to start. There's also good advice for Web accessibility on the RNIB site which goes beyond just sight-related problems. Please check out our Webmaster links here. |
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