The university provides support for official units to develop and maintain their own web sites. Computing Services and University Advancement offer a free Content Management System (CMS) that helps to ensure consistent design and navigation across university websites. Each page has assigned areas for text, images, navigation, callout boxes and breadcrumbs. By using the CMS, all fonts and colors are already coded and decided. Visit the Content Management System website to learn more. You can also contact the CMS team in Computing Services for help.

All of the information within these web guidelines are in agreement with the web templates, and vice versa. So, if you're using the templates, the typography, fonts, colors and navigation are already defaulted to the correct settings. Questions about the web guidelines? Don't hesitate to contact us.

The wordmark should appear in a prominent position on every web page. The best position is the top left corner.

The name of a school, department or any other entity must appear below, never above, the university wordmark.

If you are using the web template designs and currently have an university unitmark, we advise you to use the recommended "CMS mark" by itself in the space provided (exhibit A). This way it does not appear to be repetitive with the CMU wordmark. If you are using the web template designs and currently have an university unitmark within a named college, we advise you to use the recommended "CMS Two-Tier mark" by itself in the space provided (exhibit b). This way it does not appear to be repetitive with the CMU wordmark. If you have a logo that falls outside of the identity system templates, place it in the space provided (exhibit C). For all other options, please contact Communications Design and Photography Group.  

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit C

All images should be JPGs, GIFs or PNGs. JPGs are used for photos. Graphics should use GIF or PNG formats (logos, cartoons, etc.). Note that Internet Explorer 6 does not support transparent PNG files.

Please make sure your images have a resolution of 72dpi (dots per inch) and are in either RGB or indexed color modes.

Do not resize images using HTML. Images displayed on a page should be actual size; resizing should be done in a photo editing application, such as Adobe^® Photoshop^®. Unless you are using photography, please stay within the suggested web color palette.

Below are the majority of colors used on www.cmu.edu and its sister sites. The primary university web colors are red (hexadecimal #990000) and dark gray (hexadecimal #464646). The secondary colors are only used to support the primary colors. Please stay within these colors for any graphics/text/backgrounds used on your site.

Primary Web Colors		Secondary Web Colors
	red #990000		light grey #d4d4d4
	dark grey #464646		light tan #f3f0e9
			violet #674c56
			blue #7493a2
			mustard #c1a562
			brown #936241
			orange #d17702
			green #999933
			tan #ac9d74

For body copy, the recommended faces for the web, in order of preference, are Verdana, Arial and Helvetica. The browser should use Verdana first; if it is not available, use Arial and then Helvetica. If none are available, use another sans serif font.

Example: font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

Navigation should always be on the top and/or left. Navigation should work similarly to www.cmu.edu/silicon-valley and www.cmu.edu/cee.

Documents, such as PDFs and MOVs, should open in a new window and be labeled [.pdf] or [.mov] in the link, for example:

Watch Professor Smith’s lecture [.mov]

Links should be relevant text. Do not link words like "here," "this page," etc. Search engines will not be looking for the word "here"; they will be searching for the words in the subject. For example:

For more audio and video, see our multimedia archive.  Correct

See the multimedia archive here.  Incorrect

If you have the ability to implement an RSS feed, it should be updated at least once a week. The RSS and RSS rollover images are located in the homeimages folder:

http://www.cmu.edu/homeimages/btn_rss.png
http://www.cmu.edu/homeimages/btn_rss_over.png