To keep a consistent look and feel, standards have been set in place on the www.northland.edu website. This portion of branding helps your pages fit into the Northland scheme and gain credibility.

All regular pages within the northland.edu domain need to follow the following style rules or they may be removed from the website.

HTML headers are utilized to label information in the copy text. They are important for search engines and web readers use them to skim pages. Headers are generally available from 1 - 6, with decreasing importance as the number rises. Northland.edu uses header levels 1-3 in normal practice.

Header level 1 is reserved to describe the entire page and is programmatically placed in the document from the display name--You should not utilize a header level 1 outside of this scope.

Header level 2 denotes sections of a document and is styled with an underline.

Header level 3 shows the lowest level of content division.

Simply bolding text is not a substitution for declaring a header.

Copy text should remain concise and with an active voice. For style consistencies, The Chicago Manual of Style is our recommended choice. The exception is press releases in which we recommend The Associated Press Stylebook. An online version of The Chicago Manual of Style is available at: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/cmosfaq.html

Copies of the Associated Press Stylebook are available in the Communication Office.

Copy text should be aligned left, utilizing the standard sans serif text formatting.

Changing of fonts, color and size are not permitted.

To change or add a photo to the website, contact the College Communication office. They will approve all photo changes, make the photo the correct size and resolution, and make sure the photo fits the design of the page. Exceptions to this rule may be made on a case by case study.

College Communication has a number of photos available for content managers to look at. If you wish to take a photo for the web, it needs to meet certain criteria. Some basic guidelines for taking a photo, according to Kodak, are:

Look your subject in the eye Use a plain background Use flash outdoors Move in close Move it from the middle Lock the focus Know your flash’s range Watch the light Take some vertical pictures Be a picture director

Additional information can be found at: http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-path=317&pq-locale=en_US

Images can be used inline with the text. Images may also “float” along side the text. Stock photos and clip art style graphics are generally not used on the Northland College website.

Linking of internal (within the Northland CMS) documents should be done with the hypertext manager widget and not with the URL. Off site links as well as any non HTML documents (ie, specify that a link goes to a PDF document) should be clearly labeled as such. Linked text should be descriptive of what the user is going to.

Example: Download the online signup form (PDF) to get started today!