Best Practices in County Web Development

1. Filenames vs. Titles – Filenames and directory names should be very short and not contain any spaces or special characters. The filenames and directory names will be part of the URL (web address). Titles, on the other hand, can be descriptive and contain spaces but cannot contain special characters. Titles appear in the blue bar at the very top of the browser window. Titles will appear in search engine results.
2. Announcements – The "Announcements" section of the county homepages is intended for ONLY very important announcements. For example, if there were an approaching hurricane, Mobile and Baldwin counties, etc. may want to post shelter information, links to the EDEN site, etc. "Welcome" statements do not qualify, nor do upcoming events. Upcoming events are to be posted to the calendar so that they will automatically displayed in the green sidebar of the page, on the county’s web calendar, and on the ACES web calendar. Other page content can be added to the county homepage in the "About County" section.
3. Links – The bulleted list of links on the county homepage should be kept short and consise to make it easier for the public to find what they are looking for. Group related links and put them on a separate additional page so that they only take up a single link in the bulleted list. Links to non ACES sites such as city, county, chamber of commerce sites should be on a separate page found under a link that reflects the fact that these are external links. You should not use up the limited space on your county’s homepage advertising external entities not representing them as being part of ACES.
4. Fonts – Just because you have the ability to change the size of fonts or make them bold, italicized, underlined, any color of the rainbow, or some strange font face does not mean that you should. Fonts should be standard Arial, Helvetica, Veranda, sans serif faces. If you use unusual fonts not only does it look unprofessional, but the viewer must have that same font installed on their computer to view it. Font colors should be left the standard black unless absolutely necessary. Most people expect colored or underlined text to be links. If they are not, people tend to assume that they are dead or broken links. And, as the saying goes, "all bold is no bold". Use text effects like bold, italics, underline and color sparingly so that they retain their significance.
5. Links within Content – Whenever possible you should make regular, descriptive text into a link rather than using long, ugly URLs as links. For example, if you refer to a publication, make the title of the publication into a link to the publication rather than showing the entire URL as the link.
6. Path Changes – All the county web directories exist in a directory on the server called "counties". So, the actual address is "http://www.aces.edu/counties/CountyName/". However, there are redirects in place on the server for every county so that you can leave the "counties" directory out of the web address. "http://www.aces.edu/CountyName/" There are other instances of shortcut redirects on the server too. "dept" is interchangeable with "department" and "http://www.aces.edu/pubs/" is the same as "http://www.aces.edu/department/extcomm/publications/". Whenever possible use the shortest address both in your links on the pages you work on and in your marketing efforts.
7. Copying Files – Whenever possible you should link to content where it already exists rather than making your own copy of the files to link to. For example, if you want to link to a publication, you should link to it where it already exists in the publications directory rather than saving your own copy of the file and adding it to your website. This is also true of 4-H forms, weather information, the mission statement, etc. This will ensure that you are always linking to the most current and official version of the file and save file space on the server.
8. Email Links – When you create a standard "mailto" email link, you leave your email address exposed to be harvested by spammers to be added to junk mail lists that are sold and resold. To avoid this, you can create a "secure" email link. To do this visit the Tools and Guides section of the Web Development page in the CTU website. You will just need an ACESAG user ID.
9. Page Layout – Never use spaces or tabs to control page layout such as to center text on a page. This should be controlled by the alignment of the text, object, or table cell. Be aware that text will appear and lay out differently on different computers, different browsers, different screen resolutions, or based on individual user settings such as "large fonts", etc. For items that will be printed, such as forms, they should be put up as PDF files, not HTML.
10. PDF Files - In general, any item that will be printed by the end user should be put up as a PDF even if you also post an html version. This will preserve the formatting of the page and ensure that the page will look as close to the same as possible regardless of what computer or printer the person is using. You should avoid posting files in their original format such as Word, Publisher, Powerpoint, Excel, etc. except for internal use only. This is because, with these formats, the person on the receiving end must have the program that the file was created in to be able to open the file. Acrobat reader, which opens PDF files, comes with most browsers and is available for free if you need to download it. So, anyone can use it. To create PDF files you need the full version of Adobe Acrobat which can be downloaded from the Software Licensing System which is linked from the CTU section of the Intranet or the Software section of the CTU website.
11. Images – Images on the web are always displayed at 72 dpi (dots or pixels per inch). You should make your images the height and width you want, at 72 dpi, all in your image editing program before you try to use the image in a web page. Although it is technically possible, never resize images in the html of the page. This distorts the image and requires the viewer to download the full file size of the image regardless of how small the html is set to display it on the page. For more information on image editing, see the Graphics & Imaging information in the Software section of the CTU website. This is also linked from the Web Development section of the CTU website.
12. Under Construction – Avoid using "Coming Soon" or "Under Construction". If a page isn’t ready, don’t make it available to the public until it is ready. Don’t add dead links to your website. Wait until the pages you are linking to are ready before you add the links to your page.
13. Make Sense – Think about your page from the perspective of your target audience, the general public. Use common sense. Do not overuse acronyms that are not defined in the page. Don’t add real links to your homepage that point to experimental or unfinished pages.
14. Success Stories – If you log into the ETP system and visit your success stories you will see a "public" address at the bottom of the page. Use these addresses when linking to success stories. These addresses allow people to view the success stories without having to log in. It is not necessary to attempt to recreate the success stories on your own.