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Guidelines for AALLNET Webmasters

These are draft guidelines for AALL Committee, SIS and Chapter webmasters.

Objectives

The purpose of the AALLNET is to expedite the flow of information about and within the American Association of Law Libraries. To that end, AALL encourages all of its Committees, Special Interest Sections and Chapters to have and maintain web sites, on AALLNET itself if they wish.

Guidelines for AALLNET Webmasters

The specific requirements for all Web pages on AALLNET are:

  • Include AALL branding on the pages. Example, including "American Association of Law Libraries" or the AALL logo
  • Include a link to the AALL Web site
  • Include the date the web page was last modified
  • Include a copyright statement.
  • Include the name and email address of the person responsible for the web page
  • Advertisements and other commercial activity are restricted.
  • Proof all work, spelling in particular
  • Make sure they are reviewed at least once a year to ensure that information is up-to-date
  • Review the AALLNET Copyright Policy
  • Include the TITLE element in their pages (<title> </title>)
  • Use lower case letters for filenames (including extensions)
  • Not use special characters (e.g. &,$,%,#,@) in filenames
  • Not use blank spaces in filenames. Use hyphens instead

Recommendations

  • We support both HTML and ASP, but we recommend coding in HTML
  • Use WYSIWYG software like Microsoft Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver to help develop you web pages
  • Make sure web pages render well on current and older versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox
  • If support is needed, contact the AALL Webmaster

Elements of Web Style

Basic good practices for all web authors include:

  • Use only standard Web fonts for text
  • Make font size relative, so users can increase or decrease the font size as needed
  • Include consistent navigation bar(s)
  • Make sure pages print clearly (including without background image).
  • Conform to an HTML and CSS and accessibility validators (e.g. W3C's HTML Validation Service and Bobby)
  • Avoid using frames
  • Use standard link colors (blue and purple)
  • Use underlining for links, not for text
  • For internal links, use relative rather than absolute links
  • For gif's, fonts and backgrounds (not jpeg's), try to use the 216 "Web safe" colors. For more information, see lynda.com
  • Graphics with many colors and details (photographs in particular) are better saved as jpeg files. Gif is better suited to simple graphics, such as logos
  • If specifying pixel widths for tables, the maximum width should be 800. If wider than that, users with monitors of 800 x 600 will need to scroll right, which most prefer not to do. Graphics should also be no wider than 800 pixels
  • All image tags should include width, height and an "alt" description. For example: <img src="aall.gif" width="125" height="93" alt="American Association of Law Libraries">
  • To speed download time, particularly for users with slow modems, keep the total file size of each page (including inline images) to a minimum. 50K is a good rule-of-thumb for the maximum
  • Ampersands (&) should be coded as &amp; and copyright (©) as &copy; when in the body of a file. The codes for other unusual characters can be found at the ISO 8859-1 character set overview
  • Use an abbreviated writing style to help people looking for information quickly
 
 
 
   © 2008 American Association of Law Libraries