Curators' Guide

Web curators are designated individuals in each department who assist the marketing department by publishing and maintaining information on the web site. With over 10,000 pages on our site, we wouldn't be able to maintain as much content without the help of curators. Thus, it is very important that curators be actively involved in the creation and maintenance of their portion of the web site. They must also be well educated in best practices so that our site may be maintained more easily.

The marketing department is working toward moving all pages into a content management system (CMS). This will require some new standards and a new effort in curator education, but also many of the items below will be taken care of by the CMS.

Web curators should be aware of the following topics:

Basic web design

• Document hierarchy
• Semantic markup
• Page validation
• Doctype
• Document encoding
• Title and meta information

Standards for consistent professionalism

• Look and feel of the site
• Email address protection
• File naming conventions
• Hyperlink conventions
• Persistence of links
• Use of photos
• PDFs and Word documents

More resources

• Where to go for help
• Use of Dreamweaver
• EMU editorial standards