Webpage checklist

If you are submitting content to the live site, here are some of the things you should check before submitting a page for approval or approving a page.

Page structure and settings

• Pages have a title, which is sentence-capitalised and acts as the main heading for the page.
• Pages have a filename which is lower-case, short and informative. The filename should only include lower case letters with dashes to separate the words, e.g. 'global-rankings-success' rather than 'Success!Universityinglobalrankings'. All words should be lower case in the filename, even if it includes names, countries or acronyms.
• Pages have a menu name, based on the page title but shortened if necessary.
• The Description field in the Meta Data tab is filled with a text no longer than 255 characters describing the page.
• Homepages should only be named "index". 

Text formatting

• Extra spacing is removed. This includes spacing between lines, before and after headings, and more than one space between sentences.
• All text, including titles, headings and links, is sentence-capitalised – only words that would be capitalised in a normal sentence have a capital letter.
• The introduction is styled using 'intro_user' not 'Heading 2'
• All text is left-justified.
• If necessary, text is highlighted using bold – avoid underlining, italics, colouring or all-caps.
• Dates are formatted as Monday 6 November 2009, times as 09:00, 15:30. 
• Italics should only be used for publication titles or the occasional emphasis, not for section titles or large sections of text

Text content

• Complicated language should be avoided when possible
• Writing should be clear and concise 
• Links should describe their purpose and make sense out of the context of the page - avoid 'click here' and 'fill in the form' - instead explain the content the user is going to e.g. 'Fill out our Accessibility requirements form' 
• URLs should not be used as hyperlinks
• Ensure you use the inbuilt spell checker within Contensis to check your page for spelling errors

Headings and titles

• Descriptive headings have been used throughout the page, starting just after the page introduction.
• Nested Headings have been used starting with Heading 2 in the paragraph styles dropdown. 
• Appropriate heading styles have been used - headings should not be in bold - and they follow a logical order
• Headings are a sensible length and have no full stops, colons or semi-colons at the end.

Links and bookmarks

• Each link and bookmark on the page goes where expected (check using page preview).
• All link text makes sense out of context, and says where the link is going to. (e.g. "The University of Birmingham" and not "click here").
• Links to web pages – even pages from outside the University – open in the same window.
• Links do not include spaces before or after, or any punctuation after the link.
• Ideally, links should be included within the text, rather than written out in full, e.g. University of Birmingham rather than www.birmingham.ac.uk. Where full addresses are needed, these should be written without the ‘http://’ prefix and without any “/” at the end.

Linking to documents

• Document titles include their type and file size in the following format: (PDF – 122KB) or (DOCX - 103KB)
• Links to documents follow the format: Descriptive document title (file extension - file size in KB).
• Avoid PDFs where possible as they are hard to make accessible. Instead make the content a web page. If it must be a document the best document format would be an accessible Word Document. 

Images

• All images have alt text which describes the image. Please note: alt text is not needed on promo rows if the link text is descriptive enough.
• Images are not used to convey information / text alternatives are provided for content presented in the image. 
• Only use images that are licensed to be used by or that belong to the University.
• Check that images are optimised and not degrading site speed. Images should be compressed to levels as detailed on the Layouts, features and templates page

Tables

• Tables are only used to present data.
• Merged cells and complicated table layouts are avoided.
• Tables have header rows/columns, a caption, and a summary defined.
• Wide and complex tables have the accessibility styling added to them to avoid scrolling on mobile.

Videos and podcasts

• All videos have captions and podcasts have a transcript (or other text equivalent) which is available on or from the page they are embedded in. Read the Video and Audio Content Accessibility Standards for more detailed information. 

Accordions

• Accordions should only be used for footnoting supporting content, or for listing a series of separate items where a user will only need to access one cupboard (eg Country specific information).