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Kudos to everyone on the wonderful progress you've made converting sites to the new templates. Having perused some of your sites, we noticed a few issues that seem to need clarification. Please take note of the following:
Top Navigation links must neither be altered nor removed.
The top navigation links have been provided to offer navigational continuity across all websites at Case. This is an important tool for users who will learn that from any page they can always reach the main site, the directories pages, or the main search engine. This is particularly critical for users who land on a page from outside the University. If a search result brings them to a page within Department X's site, when they really need to visit Department Q, the top navigation gives them quick access to the tools they need to find the appropriate page.
We understand that web maintainers may also want similar features for their own pages, especially those with large sites.
In those situations we recommend using either your side navigation areas or your footer navigation to house links you would like included on every page.
Use all caps for your department name in the masthead, and keep the name aligned to the bottom.
All caps have been designated for use in the masthead to offer
visual continuity between sites, and to prevent descenders
on lowercase letters such as "y" and "p" from either disappearing
or protruding beyond the graphic (depending on one's browser.)
If your department name seems too large in all caps, you may
adjust your style sheet to reduce the typesize. To do so, open
the stylesheet in a text editor and change font-size in H1
to something less than 28 pixels. (Please do not make it any
smaller than absolutely necessary.)
Use list elements, <ul> and <li> for your menus
in side navigation, related sites, etc.
Menu items have been formatted as lists both for ease of use,
and to improve accessibility. When links are listed adjacently,
some screen reading programs may read them as one item, making
it difficult for the user to distinguish between the links.
<p>, <br/>, nbsp;, and <div>'s do not provide
sufficient differentiation for most of these programs, while
<li>'s, images and visible characters do. To better understand this issue, try to read the following sentence aloud and see if you can determine where one link ends and another begins.
Case Western Reserve University
is
reinventing the
college experience.
Server Side Includes (ssi) can save you time when editing large sites.
If you have a menu, footer, or other element that is used
on a number of pages within your site, consider using a server
side include. To do that simply cut the code for that element
from your filename.html file, paste it into a blank text file
and save that as filename.ssi. Then in your filename.html file
you will insert <!--#include virtual="../ssi/filename.ssi"
--> in place of the element you removed. To keep track of
your .ssi files you may wish to keep them all in a directory called ssi as shown in the path above.
View the code for a sample page that uses
.ssi files. (Note that in this example they've been used for
almost any repeating element that might be changed.) Visit the links below to see examples of the .ssi files. (While these examples link to files ending in .html, the files you use will end in .ssi as shown in the names.)
Web maintainers not using the Case web server: Not all servers are configured to handle ssi files in the same manner. Some will require you to use .shtml rather than .html. Before fully implementing ssi on your site, run some tests. If your code seems correct, yet your files aren't working properly, you may need to contact your server administrator to ensure that ssi is enabled.
While ssi is useful for including files, it can be used for much more. SSI is used regularly to run CGI programming, show the time of day, etc. Learn
more.
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