Committees and units may choose to submit brief information to the WLA Webmaster for inclusion on the WLA site, or they may choose to create a committee or unit home page separate from the WLA site. The guidelines will differ depending on which approach a committee or unit chooses to take. There will be no commercial advertising on the committee and unit websites.

If a committee or unit wants to have their basic information included on the WLA site:

• Creation of the basic text of the information about a particular committee or unit will be the responsibility of the committee or unit itself.

• Text for inclusion on the WLA web site must be submitted to the WLA Webmaster, and must meet the following guidelines:
  • Total length should not exceed approximately one typewritten page. Consider the content to be comparable to what would be included in a small, threefold brochure.

  • The preferred submission format is ASCII text, either by email or on an MS-DOS formatted diskette. If someone from the committee or unit knows how to do html markup, submitting marked up text would facilitate the process. The WLA webmaster may edit the page to conform with other pages. Formatting will be done according to standardized page layout developed for the WLA web site. Committee or unit volunteers working on this project may wish to consult with the WLA webmaster to determine the most efficient method for submission of data.

  • Submissions may be in hard copy, but it should be noted that this may slow the process of getting information on the web site, and that elaborate formatting may not be duplicatable when conversion to html is done.

  • Committees or units should submit descriptive information that is not subject to frequent change. It is encouraged, though, that a committee or unit include the name, and contact information such as email address or telephone number for the current chair or entire Board. All submissions should include: name of the committee or unit, description of the committee or unit's functions and major activities, date of submission or latest update, affiliation with WLA.

  • Submissions should allow for two weeks lead time.

  • Information submitted may be of interest to a broader audience than just the committee or unit membership.

• Storage of the committee or unit's web site would be the responsibility of the committee or unit. All creation, updates and maintenance of the site should be handled by committee or unit representatives.

• Committees or units which choose to maintain their own site have more flexibility than those who want their information included on the WLA site. They may, for instance, choose to include more current and changable information such as current year officers, conference themes, etc.

• The committee or unit should designate a person in charge of its web site. That person should communicate with the WLA webmaster to insure that links from the WLA main site remain active.

• Committees and units should follow these basic standards and guidelines for their pages:
  • Content
    1. Name of the committee or unit on the home page
    2. Name, address, and email address of the contact person on the home page
    3. A link to the WLA home page with logo and standard statement (provided by WLA) on the home page
    4. Date of the last update on every page
    5. Copyright statement on every page, reading: (copyright 19__ Wisconsin Library Association)

  • Design
    1. Keep pages short and simple
    2. Provide warnings when large documents may be loaded
    3. Avoid very large graphics, or large quantities of small ones
    4. Committees and units should develop a "style sheet" for their pages to maintain consistency
    5. Use special tags, e.g. bold, italics, blinking, etc. sparingly
    6. Provide alternative text for all graphics
    7. Avoid browswer-specific tags

  • Procedural/Technical
    1. Create a plan on how revisions will take place (a schedule for updating, who will do, etc.)
    2. Spell-check and proofread all documents before mounting
    3. Create source code that is readable by future (human) maintainers (for example, liberal use of line breaks and white space in the source documents, comment lines, etc.)
    4. Test your pages with real users and multiple browsers, both graphical and text-only