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Best Practices

We've compiled these tips to help you navigate the sometimes confusing waters for your website. If you have tips that could be helpful for fellow Cascade CMS users, please e-mail us.

Associated Press Style

Text on Brandeis websites should follow the grammar, punctuation and spelling rules outlined in the Associated Press Stylebook. The Office of Communications recommends that you purchase the latest edition of the AP Stylebook from www.apstylebook.com.

Download a quick reference document. (PDF)

Spelling

All Web pages must be free of spelling errors. Carefully proofread material and review the Cascade CMS spell-checker results that appear after you submit a page. You may also toggle the spell-checker in the WYSIWYG to underline misspelled words in red.

Space Between Sentences

Sentences should be separated by only one space. Two spaces between sentences is an outdated and incorrect convention.

Adding Emphasis

Use bold text and preset headline styles to add emphasis. Do not use ALL CAPS or italicized text, which pixelates on a computer screen and hinders readability. Do not use underlined text, which signifies hyperlinks on many websites.

Naming Folders and Files

Folder and file names should be short, descriptive, all lowercase and contain no spaces; hyphens are permissible.

• Correct: faculty, courses, news-events, prez-letter.pdf, smith.jpg
• Incorrect: faculty and staff, Resources, president-annual-report-december-2008.pdf

Image Sizing

Images should be resized to the correct dimensions needed on your site. Do not upload large files (multiple megabytes). We recommend Adobe Photoshop Elements for resizing images. This software can be purchased through LTS. If this software is not available to you, you can use PicResize 3.0, a free, Web-based product that was created by a Brandeis graduate student.

You may use the following as a quick reference for your images:

Main Content Images 

• Horizontal image width: 200 pixels
• Vertical image width: 115 pixels
• Horizontal slideshow images: 397 pixels wide by 266 pixels high
• Vertical slideshow images: 266 pixels high (width may vary but should not exceed 397 pixels)

Sidebar Images

Images placed in the sidebar are meant to be small and not detract from the main content area.

• Width: No more than 75 pixels if text will wrap around the image
• Width: No more than 115 pixels if text will appear above or below the image

The slideshow is 397 pixels wide by 266 pixels high. A black background is applied to vertical images, which should also be resized to 266 pixels high. Images that are not resized to these dimensions will look blurry or distorted in the slideshow.

Image Color Format

Images must be in RGB color format. If you upload an image and see a text error instead of the image in View/Preview, you may have uploaded an image in CMYK color format. 

Metadata

The metadata you enter will help Google and other search engines find your pages. The Title appears at the top of the visitor's Web browser and in search results. This information is critical, as search engines index this information and rank pages accordingly. The structure of the title should be:

Name of Page | Folder Name | Website Name

"Brandeis University" is automatically added by the CMS.

Google often uses a good Description, or part of your Description, as the snippet below the Title in search results. Google no longer uses what you enter in the Keywords field in search rankings.

Broken Links

After publishing a page, folder or site, click the Home button in the CMS to read the publish message in My Messages. It will list any broken links.

Left Navigation

The "Home" page should be the last link in the column.