OIT Website Guidelines

Outlined below are website guidelines for the OIT website, www.alaska.edu/oit , and are meant to help maintain a consistent look and style throughout the site. Having a consistent web presence promotes a unified image of OIT and is conveyed through the look, tone, and message presented by the site. In short, these guidelines exist to help create and sustain OIT’s site as a unified whole rather than disparate parts.

The website’s primary goal is to showcase OIT's services. Additionally, the site highlights current events and announcements, projects and reports, system status, and general help information. The site also acts as an information source for OIT internal staff doing business within the OIT operating unit. Visitors to the site should easily discern OIT's mission and organizational structure.

Content Standards

The site falls within the University of Alaska Statewide website guidelines and certain content standards are highlighted here:

Content posted to the site needs to be relevant, timely, and concise.
Care should be taken to limit the amount of OIT jargon, since the site is accessed by a variety of audiences, including faculty, staff, students and the general public. Visitors may not know references such as �“submit a ticket”, EDIR, ELMO, M drive, etc. Consider the audience when creating content.
For content containing acronyms, spell out in full followed by acronym in parenthesis. If mentioned in the text that follows just the acronym may be used. Example: “The University of Alaska's Enterprise Directory(EDIR) includes contact information for departments, current faculty, staff, students, and a relatively small number of other University affiliates.”
Grammatically correct content, free of spelling errors, is ideal.
Only one space is used between sentences.
Make a point to have content reviewed by other trusted editors prior to posting.
Left aligned text is the norm throughout the site.
Use graphics in moderation and with purpose, only to support text or illustrate a point.
White space is encouraged. When possible, use white space to provide visual breathing room for the eye, to break up text and graphics, and make a page less cramped, confusing, or overwhelming to the viewer.
Logos other than the OIT and MAU logos should not be included on the OIT Website.
Yellow left-side links are used to refer visitors to additional information or help beyond the actual service catalog index. Duplicate yellow links for the same URL are discouraged. A general rule is that the number of yellow left-side links should not exceed ten, including sub-links, though there are some exceptions to this rule.
When a link takes the visitor outside of the OIT Website, this should not create a new window. There may be exceptions to this standard, but no new windows is the site norm.
Page layouts in Roxen have the option of one, two, or three columns. Columns are used to separate information. Using more than one column can also can break up information so that it is more legible, while too many columns can also make text less legible.
A general rule of thumb is a maximum of 300 words of edited content per page.
When creating content for the site, refer to the service a department provides, rather than the department providing the service. Here is an example of the difference:

Description of shared storage from a department/technology perspective-
Windows servers administration provides data storage services and file server management.
Description of shared storage from a service business perspective-
This service includes data storage and file server management.

We are in IT for YOU

Contact Service Desk

Self Service

OIT Website Guidelines

Content Standards

Font Styles & Preferred Usage

OIT Home Page Content

Standard Usage and Format