SCOPE
This policy applies to all faculty, staff and student employees in the College of Fine Arts seeking to use university resources to create a website.
POLICY STATEMENT
To ensure consistency with institutional branding, security standards, accessibility requirements and governance, any new websites that use university resources must receive prior approval from the Office of Communications in the College of Fine Arts. Websites that might be created or maintained outside of university-approved platforms will undergo more scrutiny before receiving approval to ensure ongoing compliance.
University funds may not be used to build websites on third-party platforms such as Wix or Squarespace because these platforms do not meet the university’s security and accessibility requirements.
CONTACT
To discuss your project and request permission for a new website, please contact Director of Communications Alicia Dietrich (alicia.dietrich@austin.utexas.edu).
Review Criteria
When assessing a request for a new website, we will ask the following questions:
- Is there a need for a new website, or can this content be integrated into an existing website?
- Who is the audience, and what are the business needs of the website?
- Who will manage the website?
- Is the website only meant to be live for a defined period of time? Is there a plan to sunset it?
- Can the business needs be met using a university-supported solution?
- If the requestor doesn’t think the website can be built on a university-supported solution, are there sufficient funds to hire an experienced contractor to build the website to meet the university’s stringent accessibility, security and privacy standards?
- Are there sufficient, recurring funds allocated to maintain the website so that it continues to meet the university’s accessibility, security and privacy standards?
- Will the website owner agree to assume the website owner responsibilities outlined in the below section to ensure that the website complies with all federal, state and university policies?
- What is the transition plan if the website owner leaves the university?
Website Owner Responsibilities
If a new website is approved, the new website owner agrees to the following responsibilities.
- Assign and maintain an on-site departmental technical contact (liaison). This contact is the person to which questions and issues will be raised about technical and functional requirements. The technical liaison is responsible for the following duties. These responsibilities may be delegated under the liaison’s supervision.
- Ongoing maintenance and support for the website, including (but not limited to) updates to the website infrastructure. Due to the fast pace of evolving technologies and security risks, annual required updates should be anticipated and will require funding allotment.
- Ensuring the website has an accessibility score of 90% or higher. This liaison will be assigned as the web portfolio manager for the website scanning tool called Web Governance used by the University ADA/Section 504/PWFA/EIR Coordinator. Web Governance provides an overall accessibility score and flags potential issues. Potential issues are ones that cannot be verified by a scanning tool. The expectation is that the individual web portfolio managers will manually review potential issues via the Web Governance tool review process and make adjustments as needed.
*Manual portions of the scan will require some technical skills and can take 40+ hours to complete to ensure website is meeting appropriate accessibility score.
- If needed, coordinate with University Communications Standards Committee (UCSC) and UT Network Information Center as needed to request Domain Name Service (DNS) changes for a the website Domain Name by completing the Domain Name Request process.
- At least once per year, the liaison must confirm access credentials are available to at least one on-site authorized user for the site and de-authorize or remove accounts for users who no longer require access to the site.
- Attend to Search Engine Optimization, ensuring content is indexable by search bots with accurate structured and meta data.
- Collect data analytics about website visitor interactions. Usually this is done by working with the web team to enable Google Analytics on the website.
- Ensure that services, including hosting, are approved for the appropriate data classification by the University Information Security Office.
- See the University ISO Policies on Cloud Services for details.
- See also the University’s ISO policy on University Data Classifications.
- Agree to comply with the following UT Austin standards and policies: