The template process

Step 1

To begin the process of using the YSM template to represent your organization on the web, you should contact the YSM Office of Institutional Planning & Communications (YSM-IPC) (Lena Parker or Justin Fansler) or ITS-WS (Kimberly Pasko) to setup an initial meeting.

Before the initial meeting, please take time to review this site to gain a better understanding of the template project, including template guidelines and styles.

During the initial meeting, ITS-WS and YSM-IPC will take time to further explain the template process, including:

• Responsibilities and work to be performed.
• Establishing a primary contact person in your organization to work with ITS-WS and YSM-IPC. Your organization is welcome to form a Web advisory committee, but one person should be designated as the central contact.
• Site production schedule.
• Cost: establish items covered by YSM-IPC and items for which your organization is responsible.
• Next steps: your organization begins developing the site navigation structure and content.

Step 2

The web organization team develops a Work Plan outlining the agreed upon project scope, deliverables, timeline and budget. All parties — your organization’s representative, a YSM-IPC representative, and an ITS-WS representative — must sign the Work Plan before production can begin.

Step 3

If this is a new website, you need to request Web space and a URL from ITS:

1. Read:
   http://www.yale.edu/its/forms/webaccount.html
2. Complete the form:
   http://info.med.yale.edu/itsforms/web/webaccount.html
3. If you would like to request a vanity URL
   (i.e. organization.med.yale.edu), complete the form:
   http://www.yale.edu/its/forms/virtualhost.html.
   You can read more about vanity URLs on the FAQ page.

Step 4

Your organization develops the site’s navigational structure, including:

• Main navigation links (orange horizontal bar) — organized globally into your organization’s most important topics.
• Secondary pages (left column) for each main navigation link (orange horizontal bar).
• Third level pages that are organized under the secondary pages.

To help you visualize a site map, click to view an example received from the W.M. Keck Foundation.

Step 5

Your organization determines preliminary content for the web team to begin creating the site on their development server:

• Organization’s name for the entity title area.
• Organization’s address (no more than seven lines).
• Whether some page content will be served and remotely updated from YSM, such as News, Contact information, or YSM publications.
• Select Toolbox items and determine content for those pages.

Step 6

A meeting between your organization and the web team to review the site’s navigation structure. ITS-WS will take the site map that you have developed and create the initial shell pages for the site on the ITS-WS development server.

Step 7

Begin developing image options for the home page image banner. Images for the space can be obtained from your organization’s photography collection, or YSM-IPC can arrange for a professional photographer to take new photos. Steps include:

• Look through images your organization currently owns. For example, if your organization has research labs, microscopy photographs often make great banner images. See the Department of Immunobiology site as an example.
• If your organization does not have appropriate images, develop a list of potential images/locations for the professional photographer to visit. If there are multiple locations/labs/specialties on the proposed image list, please assign a contact person for each major area. Since professional photography can be expensive, the more prep work you can do, the less time the photographer will have to spend organizing the shoot.
• Setup a meeting with YSM-IPC to review banner images and finalize the selection. For more specifications about banner images, review banner image guidelines.
• Develop a description for each banner image. To provide visitors to your site with more information about banner images, your organization should develop a brief description of each banner image that will be displayed on individual “About the image” pages. See the Molecular Virology Program’s site for an example.

Step 8

Your organization develops content (text and images) for each page. This step can actually begin at any time in the process — even before you contact anyone to build out your site. We insert this step here because this is when the content will be placed into the framework of the website.

The primary contact in your organization is responsible for organizing content according to the site map and verifying that all content is correct and accurate. An important step is to get all material approved through the correct authority — for instance, faculty bios should always be reviewed by the faculty member before being posted to the site. All content delivered to ITS-WS should be in Microsoft Word and in final form.

As part of the template project, the web team will:

• Create the entity header title images.
• Create the site directory structure, including all navigation structure and empty pages for each page represented in the navigation.
• Place the banner images on the home page and establish the script for rotating the images.

At this point, you can provide all content to the web team and they will build the site, or ITS-WS can install Contribute on your computer and you can populate the empty pages with content. However, please note that this process is not instantaneous and takes some time to setup. ITS-WS can provide a timeline for setup.

ITS-WS will build, at minimum, the home page and the main navigation pages linked to from the orange navigation bar. This is extremely helpful when learning to apply the template styles to new content. Those pages created by ITS-WS can act as a guide when building the remainder of the site. Alternatively, ITS-WS can also build-out the entire site with content provided by your organization.

Step 9

Once ITS-WS has completed the site or prepared the structure with empty pages for you to populate with content, the Web editing program, Contribute, must be setup on one to five of your organization’s computers. Setup and training steps include:

1. Give YSM-IPC up to five NetIds to register with the ITS software library for a free Contribute download.
2. Once the NetIds are registered with the ITS software library, you and the other (up to five) members of your organization that will edit the site can download a free copy of Contribute. However, we recommend that only 1-2 people actually edit the site.
3. ITS-WS creates a key that installs the appropriate settings on your computer so that you can edit your new site using Contribute.
4. ITS-WS sets up a time to come to your location to install the Contribute key on the appropriate computers and provide an overview of how to use Contribute to edit your site. Online tutorials can help you with advanced problems.

Step 10

Before the site goes live, ITS-WS will establish a 1-2 week review period during which time you should extensively review the site, looking for errors or information that should be changed before the site goes live. At the end of this review period, ITS-WS will transfer the site from the development server to the “live” server. Your organization is responsible for the accuracy of all content.