The World Wide Web is an electronic publication environment that embraces existing delivery protocols on the Internet, and presents the world's publications--text, images, sounds, movies--as a seamless space which can be browsed without extensive training. The World Wide Web has revolutionized computer networking by providing its users with expanded commercial, educational, informational, entertainment, and employment opportunities.

The Bismarck State College Web site offers informational and online educational opportunites for the BSC campus, the state of North Dakota, and for the world. We provide information about the college to a wide audience, including students, prospective students, parents of students, alumni, employees, potential employees, other colleges, and the business community.

• Making faculty material, such as contact and course information, more readily available to students;
• Providing all information and transactions online to students;
• Providing online registration for people enrolling in continuing education, professional development and personal improvement programs; and
• Keeping employees more informed about the college through the Web site's intranet.

The development and maintenance of the BSC Web site is the responsibility of the BSC Web Development Specialist. The specialist is specifically charged with continually updating information, adding new information, and consulting with BSC employees and students with regard to developing their respective department webpages and to making overall content, design, and navigational improvements to their Web sites. These designated employees and students (to be determined by their immediate supervisors) are responsible for the general updating of existing web content so that it remains accurate, current, understandable and useful to readers. When necessary and appropriate, the specialist will explain the BSC Web site guidelines to employees.

ABOUT THE BSC HOMEPAGE

The Bismarck State College homepage serves a multitude of disparate customers. Most are prospective and current students. Many are community patrons and BSC employees. Others are parents and alumni. Some are experienced web users; others are not.

Our customers seek information that is relative to their interests and needs and, depending on who they are, they seek information that is most often widely dissimilar. Yet what brings all of our customers together is their desire to find information easily and quickly.

This is especially true for first-time (prospective students and parents) and inexperienced visitors (newly enrolled students), those customers who have never before visited our homepage and those customers who, while vaguely familiar with our homepage, have yet to discover what our Web site has to offer.

The BSC homepage does not challenge its first-time and inexperienced visitors, demanding that they carefully study a complex and confusing array of links before choosing what they hope will be their eventual information destination. Nor does it ignore the expectations of knowledgeable and experienced visitors. Instead, our homepage attracts its visitors with links that are clearly and immediately recognizable, that target a specific audience, and that allow an audience to quickly and easily obtain their desired information.

Through our homepage's navigational design, we are able to more fully acknowledge the disparities within our customer base by offering a venue that appeals to specific, individual needs and permits our customers to satisfy those needs in a more coherent and convenient manner.

WEB SITE CONTENT:

The following guidelines focus on Web site content, navigation, design, and customer support. They provide directional support for employees when working with the web development specialist in creating new webpages or updating existing webpages.

Webpage Conformance:

• As mandated by Federal law and ND guidelines, all BSC web pages shall conform to level Double-A of the W3C Web Content [Handicapped] Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 including all Priority 1 and Priority 2 checkpoints.
• All BSC web pages shall conform to XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup language as established by the World Wide Web Consortium.
• All BSC web pages shall conform to Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 as established by the World Wide Web Consortium.

• Double-A Accessibility: Cynthia Says Free Portal
• XHTML 1.0: W3C Markup Validation Service
• Cascading Style Sheets 2.0: W3C CSS Validation Service

Content Consistency:

All BSC webpages must exhibit consistency in the following areas (Note: Relative sizing is required for successful conformance to Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.):

• Font faces: arial, helvetica, verdana or Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans serif (text); verdana or arial,helvetica, verdana, sans serif (links); Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans serif (headers); arial, helvetica, verdana or verdana, arial, helvetica (subheads)
• Font sizes: 80% (text); 64%-80% (links); 144%-160% (headers); 90%-120% (subheads)
• Font colors (in hexadecimals): #000000 (text); #000000 or #008040 (links); #008040 (visited/active links); #000000 or #008040 (links in top/side bars); #800040 (special links); #000000 (headers and subheaders); #FFFFCE (highlighted text). Variations of the aforementioned colors may be used for headers if design configurations warrant it. (Up to the discretion of the Web Development Specialist and the Director of Communications.)

• All font and table sizing must be relative (percentages).
• All graphical images must be identified with an alternative text.
• Any Flash or applet applications must be identified with an alternative text.
• All event handlers must be rendered keyboard accessible.
• Excessive text/object motion, flashing displays, blinking lights, etc. are prohibited.

• All webpages must begin with the appropriate XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE declaration.
• All programming language must be set in lower case.
• All tags must be opened and closed.
• All attribute values must be enclosed in quotation marks.

• All font tags must use cascading style sheet tags.
• All backgrounds must be set in cascading style sheets.
• All alignment values must be set with cascading style sheet tags.
• All body and link values must be set in cascading style sheets.

• Campus address, General, CCE, or Alumni 800 tele#, Contact Person's tele#, fax# and e-mail address must appear on all webpages, and placed at the discretion of the Web Development Specialist and/or at the request of Contact Person.
• Overall Colors: The official colors of the BSC Web site include variations of green, yellow, goldenrod, maroon, or black; variations of gray or green for menu boxes; variations of gray for backgrounds; green or black for links; green or black for visited/active links; black for text (#000000); maroon or variations of red for special emphasis in text or links; goldenrod or green for hover effects.

The need for navigational consistency is crucial for any Web site, but is especially important for users unfamiliar with Internet technology. Thus, in order to facillitate ease of use and accessibility of information, the BSC Web site must contain the following navigational markers on each webpage:

• An identifiable link to the BSC homepage
• An e-mail link to each page's appropriate contact person
• Links to subpages appropriate to the specific departmental website
• An e-mail link to BSC Web Development and a time stamp to indicate upgrading of page.
• Each secondary website directly linked from the BSC homepage must include all other secondary Web site links and Campus Services links which should appear in a pulldown menu. This webpage (which you are currently viewing) reflects this navigational configuration.
• The BSC search engine link should appear on all secondary Web site pages.
• Link Font Sizes Generally link font sizes shall appear as graphical files or text (in the recommended hexidecimal code). Text link sizes should not exceed 80% and should be created in the arial hybrid or (preferably) verdana. Typically, the sidebar, topbar, menu box, and bottom page link sizes should be 64%; bold; verdana. Ideally, any linked menu should be limited to no more that 12 links, with a preference toward eight or fewer links.

As with any media publication, the text of a webpage needs to be grammatically accurate and word usage needs to be appropriate to the message. Documents to be posted to the web should be proofread carefully with extra attention paid to spelling, sentence precision, and content clarity. Submitters are strongly urged to use spell- and grammar-check software. A Web site is a reflection of one's department and of the school. It should be polished and professional. The material should also be maintained by each department's designated web content developer so that it is current, accurate, and understandable at all times.

WEB SITE DESIGN:

The following design guidelines are meant to promote a relatively clean, uncluttered look to the overall BSC Web site and thus promote a professional appearance as well as ease of operation and accessibility for the web user.

• Headlines, subheads, etc should be consistent in style, size, and font.
• Borders/lines should be consistent in size and style and be used only as necessary. If an element detracts or distracts from what is being promoted, it should not be used.
• White space should be used as a balance to provide a clean, uncluttered look.
• Fonts: use only two or three font faces within each webpage.
• Logo: The official, green/gold BSC logo appears on all webpages with size and placement variations (up to the Web Development specialist's discretion). It may be embedded in the background of a webpage, in graphical headers and photos, or as a stand alone graphic file.
• Artwork should be pertinent to the point you are trying to make and used as a focal point.
• Graphics: A minimum of graphical files should appear on any given BSC webpage so that each page ideally achieves a 6 to 8 second industry standard download time or less (56k modem), not to exceed a 12 second download time. Graphics should also provide visual clues about the related information.
• Photos should have symmetrical, consistent styles (no more than one or two border or filter types).

CUSTOMER SUPPORT:
Frequently Asked Questions

Each office and/or department who maintains a BSC Web site and who frequently interacts with customers should develop, and keep current, a Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) webpage within their respective Web sites. An FAQ page is a time-saving feature that allows customers to more fully prepare themselves for additional planning and consultation.

A FAQ link should appear on each office and/or department Web site. In addition, a Frequently Asked Questions central webpage will be linked to the BSC homepage. This central webpage will include all links to individual office/department FAQ pages, as well as their appropriate contact persons, phone numbers and e-mail addresess.

DISCLAIMER, PRIVACY POLICY, SECURITY, COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS

Disclaimer:

In order to provide you with a wide variety of information about Bismarck State College, this site links to other web sites maintained by individuals, state agencies, political subs, nonprofit organizations and private businesses. Each of these entities has the responsibility of setting their own privacy policy, and posting it on their web sites. When you link to another site, you are subject to the privacy policy of the new site. Although we try to keep this information up-to-date and accurate, neither BSC, nor any agency, officer, or employee of BSC warrants the accuracy, reliability or timeliness of any information published by this system, nor endorses any content, viewpoints, products, or services linked from this system, and shall not be held responsible for any losses caused by reliance on the accuracy, reliability or timeliness of such information. Portions of such information may be incorrect or out of date. Any person or entity that relies on any information obtained from this system does so at his or her own risk. BSC makes every effort to provide virus-free files but does not guarantee uncorrupted files.

Privacy Policy

General
Records received by the North Dakota University System from web sites are subject to the same controls and uses as records collected by governmental offices visited in person. This office provides security for information provided to it and it does not sell information it receives. We may be required to disclose collected information pursuant to a court order. In addition, we may be authorized to share this information with other state agencies for purposes of child support enforcement, law enforcement, collection of debts owed to the State or its political subdivisions and any other purpose authorized by law. Information not specifically addressed in this policy must be disclosed pursuant to the North Dakota Open Records Law.

Web Site Security
In order to protect the information being gathered, this site has security measures in place including firewalls, encryption, and authenticated access to internal databases where needed.

In order to ensure the security of all personal information collected from customers, that information will be encrypted when being transmitted across the web. This includes, but is not limited to, names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, social security numbers, financial information, credit card information, and any passwords.

Domain Information
Log analysis tools are used to create summary statistics used for administering the performance of the web sites, diagnosis of problems and determining which information is of most interest to the public. The following information is collected for analysis only:

• User Client hostname - the hostname and/or IP address if DNS is disabled of the user/client requesting access.
• HTTP header, "user-agent" - the user-agent information includes the type of browser, version, and the operating system.
• HTTP header, "referrer" - The referrer specifies the page from which the client accessed the current page.
• System date - The date and time of the user/client request.
• Status - The status code the server returned to the user/client.
• Content length - The content length, in bytes, of the document sent to the user/client.
• Method - The request method used.
• Protocol - The transport protocol and version used.

Personal Information
E-mail addresses will be collected from an application only if a response is necessary or if there is a need to correspond with web site users.

If during your visit to our site you send an email, the email address will be collected as a means to reply to you. We may forward your message to another agency for appropriate action.

• Copyrighted material (video, audio, image, text, etc.), should be posted only with appropriate permission and with that permission cited.
• Point to others' WWW spaces/documents only with their permission, unless you "know" those spaces/documents may be freely referenced.
• Certain practices remain hazy. For example, if you photograph a performer, you still may not be entitled to display the photograph on the web. When in doubt, omit the item or get permission.
• According to recent court rulings, the World Wide Web is protected under the provisions of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provided said material does not violate age restrictions or cause bodily harm to participants. Seek advice first from a supervisor, chairperson, or BSC administrator before you commit to the web any material that may appear legally questionable.

All parties submitting materials to the BSC WWW Server represent and warrant to BSC that the submission, installation, copying, distribution and use of such materials in connection with the BSC WWW Server, will not violate any other party's proprietary rights.

In some cases, there may be links to information outside the Bismarck State College Worldwide Web space. Such links do not imply BSC endorsement of content or presentation; nor does BSC bear any responsibility or legal liability for any aspect of such information. All responsibility remains that of the owner of the information.