These standards and guidelines are for the Connecticut Community Colleges' System Office and various council websites.  The websites are communication vehicles that help to enhance the image of Connecticut’s community colleges through the use of consistent, unified pages that create a greater public awareness about the colleges and the services they provide.  Each time someone visits our websites, a message is sent about the value of our organization and the unique advantages offered to students by the community colleges.

Initial access to a new site will need approval of the Website Committee.  Once access is granted the designated designers will be responsible for all changes.  We have a template website to help you get started.  Using our template website is required.  This template will be easy to use once you review our "Design Guidelines" documentation.

We have two web servers - one for development and one that is the live (or production) web server.  All changes to the website are made on the development server.  Once changes are complete the new page (or pages) will be moved to the live web server by an authorized staff person.  The intent of two web servers is to give the web developer a place to work on changes to the web site without fearing that a mistake (such as a broken link) is being viewed by the system or entire world.  It also gives you the ability to share website changes with your colleagues before the site is made available for general use.  More details on this can be found in the  "Design Guidelines" documentation.

We have developed some guidelines to help you understand some of the conventions we have in place.  These guidelines will help you understand the overall layout of our websites and also give you some very detailed instructions.  Please click here for the full Design Guideline. Below are a few of the more general guidelines for quick reference:

• Updating or adding to your website is your responsibility.  Please be sure information on your site is checked regularly and maintained.

• There are many links in the “core” system site that go to information maintained on the department and council sites, such as tuition and fees.  Therefore it is important information is kept as current as possible.

• Any changes made to your site should conform to the design guidelines, including selected fonts, because they are integrated with the design and navigation system for the entire website.  All of the sites will incorporate the font type, size and color determined by the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS)

• All changes to your site will be made on the test server before being moved to the production server.  Changes should be reviewed in the test environment to consider the effects of integrating the new information within the larger site.

• Changes to your site that would alter the template or add information not anticipated in the original design, navigation system, or map, should be reviewed with the Communications Department.

• Help in making changes to your site can be obtained from the Communications Department and the Information Technology Department web contacts.  Changes made, with or without help, should be communicated to these contacts so an accurate site map can be maintained and so “core” site information and links can be updated as needed.

• Changes to information in the “core” site can be made by the Communications and Information Technology Department staff only.  Suggestions and requests for changes to the core site related to accuracy and currency of information should be made to the Director of Communications.