Web Resources and Guidelines

Documentation for Web site Administrators

Who is a Web site administrator?

Generally speaking, Web site administrators are the people responsible for a department, or several department's, Web sites. While there may be other people who are responsible for updating individual pages, Web site administrators have responsibility for entire sites. These people have the training and skills necessary to provide consistency, messaging, and quality to their Web sites.

Publish, our Web content management and publishing system

Now owned by Adobe and formally known as Publish, our Web content management system provides an easy-to-use Web interface for editing Web pages and managing sites. This allows people without extensive knowledge of HTML and other Web technologies to create basic Web sites. Publish is an older application and as such does not support, out-of-the-box, many of the fancy "web 2.0" features.

The key advantage of using Publish for the SOU Web site is its template system. Our Web development professionals create the templates based on optimized HTML, CSS, and Publish's template PHP-based scripting language. Our Web site administrators can then quickly create pages based on these templates without having to be concerned with the page layout, fonts, colors, or style elements, thus allowing them to focus on providing high quality content. If at some point we decide to change the look or style of the entire site, we can do so simply by updating the template. All pages published from this template will then inherit the new look automatically.

Review and Approval

The Publish system allows us to have a review and approval process. Before a site or page is published, it is staged to our test server (test.sou.edu). Site administrators can then ask the appropriate person to review the site before it is published. All academic sites should be reviewed before publising by a chair or dean and all administrative sites by a director or other top-level manager.

In addition, all Web pages will be reviewed by the Marketing office. This review will be to ensure consistency in our message and how we present it. They will apply the same style guidelines that are used for the catalog and other publications, while editing any typos and grammatical errors that slip by the first review.

In the future, we will set up a formal process by which pages will have to be approved before they can be published. For now, we are relying on an informal process where the Publications Office reviews pages as they are published and then notifies the page author with suggestions for changes or corrections.

Publish Training

Publish training is a joint effort of IT and Marketing. Please contact the office of Interactive Marketing and Media Relations 541-552-6186 to get started.