ICT Advice for Lewisham Schools - Web Publishing Guidelines

Web Publishing Guidelines

1. Schools are advised when designing web sites to avoid publishing pictures of individual pupils with personal information about them. This will ensure that their privacy is protected and ensures that strangers will not be able to approach them outside school with information they have taken from the school web site. The BBC has some useful information about safety in web publishing for schools planning to take part in their 'School Report' project: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/school_report/4779911.stm

2. A senior manager in the school should take responsibility for vetting data before it is uploaded to a school web site to ensure the data is in line with school policies and best reflects the character of the school.

3. The web site should reflect the work of the whole school and web authors should attempt to seek contributions from all teachers, year groups, head teacher, governors, parents and the local community. A excellent example of this is the Sutton-on-Sea Primary School web site on: http://www.sutton.lincs.sch.uk

4. When publishing curriculum development work, web authors should seek to show the processes involved in the production of the work rather than just the product. This can be facilitated by web authors working in partnership with curriculum co-ordinators. An excellent example of a process approach to sharing primary and secondary maths work on the web is on a US Maths Forum web site on: http://mathforum.org/te/index.html

5. Most good web publishing software have spell checkers. It is advisable to ensure that work is checked before uploading to a server.

6. Copyright: When using images from other sites it is advisable to seek permission first. This can be done by sending an e-mail to the contact name on the web site. Copyright issues are dealt with on the Becta site.

7. Acknowledging sources: Make sure that you if you have used ideas from other people that you should acknowledge the source.

8. Each page of the web site should be consistent in terms of design, layout, graphics and fonts. This will make it easier for users to read and navigate the site.

9. Checking accessibility: It might be useful to check the accessibility of web pages to people with disabilities. There used to be afree public service called Bobby, but this is no longer available. You can find out a great deal about creating accessible web sites on accessible.org which is continuing the spirit of the Web Bobby project. You can test your web pages for accessibility by using the Cynthia Says web site, but you need a high level of understanding of web coding to interpret the results.

10. How users read on the web. Some research has been done into how users read web pages and offers suggestions as to how authors might write web pages. This is available on: http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting

11. A look at some award winning web sites might be helpful when planning a school web site.

At BETT 2002 West Borough Primary School won the primary award and John F Kennedy Catholic School won the secondary award.

Visit http://www.becta.org.uk/websiteawards for a full list of award winning sites.

Summary checklist of issues recommended by Becta for schools submitting sites for the Becta web site award:

Management and Ownership

Decide why you want a web site and what you want to achieve.
Nominate a senior member of staff to be responsible for the site overall, checking legal issues, obtaining parents' permission to include children's work and ensuring that it presents the school as it wishes to be seen.
Nominate a Web site editor to regularly check that links work and remove or archive out-of-date material.
Check your work and get others to check it before you publish it.

Privacy and Child Protection

Protect the identity of young people: do not publish personal information, names, e-mail addresses or photos of individual children.
Be aware of the Data Protection Act.
Children's safety has to be paramount on the Internet.

Audience

Be aware of the need to make your site as inclusive as possible.
Cater for the varied interests and needs of visitors: what information and resources will they find useful?
Exploit the medium and be creative.
Put important, new or updated information on the home page to catch people's attention.
Avoid jargon and acronyms where possible - your readers may be anywhere in the world.
Make communication two-way: ensure that visitors can send feedback or contact the school.
Keep it fresh - make your visitors want to stay there and keep coming back; provide topical items and delete or archive out-of-date material.

Design

Keep it simple, easy on the eye and consistent. Less is best: use two or three colours throughout the site and a plain white background or a pale coloured textured background.
Create a house style and page templates - careful use of colours and font sizes and similar placing of elements and navigation buttons.
Make sure pages can be printed in black and white on A4 paper.
Use light shading and invisible tables to break up continuous text.
Use sound and video only when it aids understanding.
Make graphics as small as you can so that they load quickly.
Avoid frames - they are ugly, make printing and reading difficult and they can confuse visitors to the site.
Make sure you write your site using code and stylesheets which are valid. There are several validators on the web which you can use to check that your pages will work well - see the bottom of this page where we have put in test links for this page for you to try out.

Navigation

Make a plan of your site, create the pages and then add the links between them.
On a large site, use a program that manages links automatically.
On a small site, keep the information within three clicks of your home page, or alternatively use your site plan as the home page.
Include a link on each page to your home page.
Consider how information should be organised and grouped so that users find it where they would expect to.
Avoid navigation which only works with a mouse - visitors with disabilities will want to be able to navigate with key presses, switches and other devices. Test your site for accessibility using the TAB key.

Content information

Give your pages an informative title because it will be used by search engines to index sites.
Add other 'meta tags' such as keywords to help users find your information through search engines.
Include a name and e-mail address for feedback and put a creation date on pages.
If pages are learners' work, mention their age so that people can judge the quality of the work in context.
Give graphics a title to help the visually impaired use text-to-speech tools.

Plagiarism

Respect copyright and Intellectual Property Rights of material taken from other web pages and used in your own.
Always state the source, web page address or author when using materials from other web pages.
State any constraints you wish to impose on people using your pages (for example whether you permit people copying for non-commercial educational purposes.)

Last update: 16th March 2009

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