coe-staff: Events and images on the website

[Cody Pinkston]

Good Morning,

This message is intended for those with responsibility for maintaining content on the new website.

Some of you have inquired about the status of a website-standards document. It is just about ready to go in all its mind-numbing glory, pending a final review from IT. It will be a fluid resource anyway, but it should help answer many of your initial questions. The goal is to achieve a fundamental level of consistency (within the COE and with the UO) about how our content is presented, formatted and worded. Ahead of those standards coming available, I'd like to share a few tips about entering events and using images on the website:

EVENTS

*         Your event information should always include what, when, where, who (intended audience) and how much.

*         Always enter the full name of the event as the title (the general "what")

*         The calendar tool doesn't ask for location, so that should be the first thing mentioned in the body. type "Location:" and enter the specific location, then continue. We're working to add a location field (and others) below the time/date.

*         Images (IMPORTANT): If you've already created a poster/flyer for your event and wish to include it in the event listing, you can. However, if it's a full-size, printable document you should upload it as a file so someone can view and print it at full size. Even if you do, you should take a moment to re-create all the same the essential information as text. The "Image" upload field is designed for uploading a small supporting photo, like a press photo of a guest speaker. If you use it to upload an image of a flyer, Drupal resizes it to a default "medium photo" size, which makes the text of your flyer unreadable.

*         Please do not use scanned images of hard-copy posters or flyers. Make every effort to get the original in electronic format or, if you must include it, scan it as a PDF. It's a much smaller file and it looks more professional.

*         Hopefully recurrence and other helpful features will be added to the calendar tool over time.

IMAGES

*         Drupal will automatically crop and resize photos and graphics to fit the space in question (it will not change proportions), unless it is inserted directly into the "body" section (you may not have this option depending on your access). For this reason, you should avoid using images with file sizes much smaller than about 100k. Your graphics and photos are raster graphics, which are like grid paper. The larger the file, the more "squares" there are on the grid to produce a fine picture. Increasing the physical size of a raster image increases the size (but not the quantity) of those "squares," resulting in an image that looks "low-res" or not sharp. If you need help with your photos or graphics, contact me.

*         Drupal's automatic cropping defaults to the center of the photo. If you want to control what that center looks like, you should crop it beforehand. Built-in system software such as Microsoft Office Picture Manager or iPhoto can crop photos. Make sure you rename the cropped version so you don't accidentally overwrite the original, especially if it's from a shared resource.

*         If your photos need more advanced retouching but you don't have Photoshop, there's a free "lite" Web-based photo editor called Pixlr that has comparable capabilities to Photoshop Express (www.pixlr.com<http://www.pixlr.com>).

*         Computer screens can only display 72 dots per inch of resolution, but unedited digital photos or scans generally have 200+ dots per inch. Unless you want to make a photo downloadable for printing purposes, use a photo editing program to "Save As" for Web pages. This will reduce the file size.

*         Look carefully at your photos and graphics after they've been published to the site. Are they crisp and nice-looking? Are things in the right proportion (aspect ratio)? If not, let me or IT know and we will help you fix them.

*         If using images that originated within your department or program, make sure you have signed model releases for the people in them, especially if they are UO students or children.



The UO adheres to Chicago Style for the Web, which is what we will use as well. Their style guide is online<http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/16/contents.html> and searchable. The UO also maintains Web standards<http://webcom.uoregon.edu/webstandards>. These two resources can help answer most of your questions, but if you have others specific to content on our site, please let me know.



Again, marketing and communications will never change the substance of anyone's content without permission, but we may make changes to look, typography, style or layout to comply with UO standards and best practices for the Web.



Thanks,

Cody



________________________________
[Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: cid:3406876785_2874866]Cody Pinkston | Director of Marketing | cpinksto at uoregon.edu<mailto:cpinksto at uoregon.edu>
College of Education, 270 Lokey Ed | 1215 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403 | (P) 541-346-1392

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