The new University templates are designed to meet a minimum of HTML 4.01 Transitional and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2 standards and to be accessible according to W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Priority Level 2 requirements.

For homepages, it is advisable that full content should be viewable without scrolling (either vertically or horizontally) on a 800 x 600 monitor (you can test what your pages look like at different resolutions at www.echoecho.com|). All pages should be fast to download (ideally homepages should be no larger than 60Kb including inline images) and cross-browser independent.

The key issues for maintainers designing for the University web site are to ensure that:

• your pages work with a variety of browsers, screen sizes, colour displays and connection speeds.
• you use standard HTML (not browser-specific) and your pages validate
• you have not used technologies that interfere with a site's accessibility and usability
• your site navigation gives users a sense of context and helps them quickly find the information they are seeking.

Find out how to make your web site compliant|

Read more about:
Web standards: What they are| - why bother?| - how to fix invalid code|.