Good Practice

The practice we would like to promote when Departments and other Groups of The University of Reading prepare pages for the Web includes the points below (not necessarily in order of priority).

• It is convenient to organise the Web directories in a manner similar to the way your pages will be organised. However it is even better to organise the directories to reflect the responsibilities of the people in your group or department for different areas of information.
• Although the technology used at present to provide information is the World Wide Web, this will undergo developments over the next few years and it is advisable to use the absolute minimum of vocabulary specific to this technology when you are writing your pages. Remember that text browsers will also be used to access the information therefore all instructions should appear in text, even if you have an image saying the same thing.
• Name directories and files with lower case letters and no spaces.
• Use relative pathnames whenever possible. This will make it easier to move whole directories or directory trees.
• All externally facing pages should follow the branding guidelines. The University logo should  link to the University of Reading home page. 
• Remember that using graphics slows things down. It is possible to provide very small images ('thumbnails') that expand into images when they are clicked on.
• To connect to files in directories of members of staff, the URL of the link (anchor) can be given: http://www.personal.reading.ac.uk/~username where username is the username of the member of staff concerned. See Viewing your Web Pages on how to set up pages within the home directory of a user.