The College Website
The web offers the San Jacinto College community rich resources for advancing, teaching, and research. It is an important tool for communication, learning, and scholarship. San Jacinto College provides web resources to departments for legitimate college business and scholarly activity.
San Jacinto College website and web pages should be developed with the following guiding principles:
User-Friendly Approach
Every stage of development should be steeped in consideration of the goals of your users when accessing the site. Define and prioritize your audiences, then design content, layout, and navigation accordingly. Make every element of your site intuitive and meaningful for your users.
Brand Consistency
Make sure your users know that your site is part of San Jacinto College by using the logo and supporting elements (color, imagery, etc.). Refer to the brand standards during the creative process to help guide your development.
Strong Content
Without content, there can be no site. San Jacinto College encourages departments to create program pages on the Areas of Study section of the website. Create engaging material and maintain it with regularly planned updates. Include events and news when relevant to your users. Official information that already exists on College pages (such as calendars, descriptions of programs, etc.) may not be duplicated. Links to the existing information should be provided instead. College staff must review pages regularly to keep them accurate and updated. Outdated pages are subject to removal from the College Web server.
While the College provides brand standards and encourages their adoption by its page creators, it does not require that each guideline be followed, beyond the minimum threshold of logo use. This book is meant to complement, with some flexibility, College and unit brand guidelines that accomplish more specific goals.
The College uses Associated Press (AP) style. Communicators should take care to avoid using “shop talk” in external communications. For example, avoid use of acronyms for College programs and units, as these are not readily understood outside the college.
Management of College Web Pages
The San Jacinto College marketing department web content manager oversees the appearance of all the pages on the website. The College reserves the right to review pages that are located on the College website to ensure consistency for the institution.
Page administrators are responsible for the content of their pages. Departmental pages should not attempt to duplicate official information and should link readers to the correct pages for such information.
The office of information technology services manages the resources and technical services regarding web, servers, and system configuration. ITS coordinates with the web content manager and others to determine whether departmental pages are acceptable.