FIT Web Design Guidelines for Official Pages 

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The purpose of these guidelines is to promote professionalism, usability, accessibility, and design consistency among FIT’s official web pages. Official pages include pages published by or about FIT schools, departments, offices, centers, programs, and committees. They do not include pages published by or about FIT student organizations, or individual faculty and staff members. 

Templates
Accessibility
Tips and Techniques
About Frames
About PDFs
About Streaming Media
About Macromedia Flash
About Macromedia Dreamweaver

TEMPLATES

In order to promote consistency and professionalism among our official web pages, we require the use of a series of Microsoft FrontPage templates that have been specially designed for the college for use on its Web site. Official pages produced outside of these templates will not be permitted on college servers. Click on view below to view the specific template. Templates will automatically be added to your web directory once it has been created in a folder called "FIT Templates."

Home (view)
News (view)
News with Photo (view)
Gallery page 1 (view)
Gallery page 2 (view)

ACCESSIBILITY

On September 30, 1999, the New York State Office for Technology, issued Technology Policy 99-3, Universal Accessibility for NYS Web Sites. The policy requires all New York State agencies, which includes FIT, to provide universally accessible Web sites to enable persons with disabilities to access the sites, especially those with visual disabilities who use screen readers to navigate the web. The State of New York has adopted the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C®), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI™), and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as a means to provide optimal access. Web content shall conform to Level "A," satisfying all priority one checkpoints of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Please investigate these links and learn all you can about making your site accessible.  

TIPS AND TECHNIQUES

Organization

• Understand that the purpose of web design is to enhance and support the user experience. A site's design should not create distractions or confusion; it should emphasize the site's navigation and primary elements.  Perhaps the most important element of user-centered design is consistency. In general, keep your navigation consistent; let the user know what to expect and where to find it.
   
• Plan your site's information architecture (IA) before building the site. Establish directories, subdirectories, and navigational paths. In general, organize your site (both your content structure [on your site] and your directory structure [on the server]) with user expectations in mind. The FIT organizational chart it is not a good model for creating your site. Your site's structure should require no institutional knowledge on the part of the user.

Screen Width

Design your pages to fit the general screen width that monitors and browsers accommodate. The standard used to be 640x480, but the acceptable size has increased to about 760x600.

Text

• For text, use dark colors on a light background for maximum contrast and readability.
   
• Do not underline text for emphasis; use bold or italic text instead. For web users, underlined text signifies a link.
   
• For links in text, use the browser default colors OR an intuitive color structure. Make sure text links are underlined so the user knows they are links. For graphic links, construct the navigation so links are obvious. Be consistent with text throughout your site.
   
• For website live text, use Verdana typeface at size 1 (9/10 point) or 2 (11/12 point).

Images / Graphics

• Professionalism and presentation are important. The way your graphics are designed and images presented is a reflection not only on your web site and its information and resources, but also on the entity your site represents. If you do not have experience with professional design, we recommend that you obtain assistance from someone who does.
   
• Relevance is important. The graphics on your site should be directly and obviously related to your site's content.
   

•  Legality is critical. Site developers must know, understand and comply with the rules of copyright for images on the web, as well as in print. The easy availability of images on the web, along with the anonymity of the web, can create complacency about image ownership and copyright. As a general rule, if you don't know who owns an image, or if you have not been granted express permission to use an image, do not use that image. The Office of College Relations has a library of professional college-related images that are available for use.
   

• Do not use background images. In most cases, these repeating images add nothing to the design, and are distracting and unappealing. They frequently cause problems with readability, which is an essential component of usability.
   

• Keep your image file sizes small, so the images will load quickly. This is particularly important for web pages with numerous images.
   
• Always use "alt tags" for images, as a component of accessibility.
   

• Avoid flashing or "animated" gifs. With rare exceptions, these icons do not add to the professionalism of a web page/site.
   

•  Avoid using cute or whimsical "clip art." Graphics should be professionally produced and presented.

ABOUT FRAMES

We do not encourage the use of frames. They may provide an easy way to maintain your site, but they cause problems with accessibility, bookmarking, and inter-site navigation. Please do not use frames on official FIT pages.

ABOUT PDFS

When posting forms, the Adobe Acrobat pdf format is acceptable. It is not acceptable to post large text documents as pdfs as their file size is generally prohibitive. A case can be made if the text document will be regularly printed out by users; however, general information should be posted in the HTML format.

ABOUT STREAMING MEDIA

While any file type can be published to the college’s web servers, the college does not currently support streaming audio or video.

ABOUT MACROMEDIA FLASH

Unfortunately, the Flash plug-in used by browsers to read pages programmed in Macromedia Flash is non-W3C standard, and there are currently no techniques to make it accessible. Pages may have non-essential Flash elements, but can not be programmed entirely in Flash. It is especially important that navigation is not programmed in Flash as it will be completely invisible to a screen reader. Macromedia is working very hard to remedy this situation, and we will keep you informed as to their progress.

ABOUT MACROMEDIA DREAMWEAVER

The college currently supports Microsoft FrontPage. Other web-editing software is not supported.