TalkSwindon Climate change forum
Climate Friendly Swindon group @ Facebook
 Editors Guide |
A guide for editors of this web site to ensure that we all work in a consistent manner.
This page is a work in progress, and items still to be decided are highlighted in red. If you would like to suggest additions or amendments to this guide, please log in and post a comment on this page, or write to simon [at] swindonclimate.org.uk
Events page policy
Guidelines on information to provide
Archiving policy
Information about future events to show on home page
Past events policy
After we have held or taken part in an event, a short note of the event, with the date, should go on the home page, along with a link to a page on this web site with more information where applicable, and / or coverage of the event on other web site(s). This should stay on the home page for how long? before being moved to where?.
Home page policy
The home page of the site should consist of an explanation of what SCAN is, any current announcements, brief details of future events with links to more information, and brief details of past events with links to more information.
Details of future events should be removed from the home page once they have passed, or should be re-worded to a brief report of a past event, with links added to more information.
Details of past events should be kept on the home page for how long? before being moved to where?.
The home page should provide quick access to all parts of the site, without appearing too cluttered. As a general rule, everywhere in the site should be accessible with no more than three clicks from the home page. Much of this however will be provided by the menu which appears on every page, so does not need to be included on the home page as well.
Page naming
EditMe only allows page names to be made up of numbers and letters. Two types of page name are suggested - date-specific and non-date-specific.
Date-specific pages are those which relate to a particular event or date. These should be named after the date in CCYYMMDD format, followed by a word or three describing the event or subject. Some pages may be related to a particular time period rather than a single day. These can begin with just the year, or the year and the month, rather than the whole date.
For example, a page about National Elephant Day on 5th January 2007 could be called 20070105NationalElephantDay.
Non-date-specific pages are those which are about a topic or subject but are not related to any date or date range, for example Events or LocalFood.
Please camel-case all words used in page names. Camel casing is done by removing all the spaces from a phrase and capitalising the first letter of each word. For example "on your bike" camel cases to "OnYourBike".
Pasting content from Word or other applications
Copying and pasting content from Word or other applications can result in more than just the text you have selected being added to the page, which can have undesirable consequences in terms of unwanted formatting or other hidden content being added to the page. To avoid this, please use the Paste as Plain Text Button 
rather than your browser's paste command. This will ensure that only the text is pasted into the page.
Long hyperlinks
A hyperlink with very long text can cause the page width to expand to wider than some viewer's browser windows. To avoid this, rather than using the URL of the hyperlink as the text of the hyperlink, type some descriptive text and use the Insert/edit link button 
to turn the text into a hyperlink. This has the advantage that the spaces between words in the descriptive text will allow it to wrap onto a new line if necessary, rather than forcing the page width to increase.
Formatting
This site uses cascading style sheets to control the font, size and colour of text. It is fine to change the font, size or colour of the occasional bit of text for emphasis, but most text should be left unformatted to ensure a consistent look and feel across the whole site. For a more detailed discussion of this subject, with reference to CSS and W3C standards, see this post on EditMe's community site .
When adding headings and subheadings to pages, please mark them up as the appropriate heading type using the drop-down box at the top of the page (this is normally showing "paragraph"), rather than manually making them bold and large text. This gives structure to the document, as well as ensuring that headings and sub-headings are consistently formatted across the site. Use Heading 2 for top-level headings, Heading 3 for sub-headings, Heading 4 for sub-sub-headings and so on. Please don't use Heading 1 as this is rendered as a <H1> tag, and W3C standards dictate that a page should have one and only 1 <H1> tag - this is automatically produced by the EditMe software from the page title.