Website Redesign

Best Practices

General Best Practices

Click here for Best Practices for Legacy CMS System

Accessibility

LSU Health New Orleans web content must meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards in order to provide more accessible web content for individuals with disabilities. Use this link to learn about creating accessible web pages.

Documents

  • Ensure documents are necessary for public access before posting
  • All documents uploaded to the website must meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards
  • Only keep the most current version of a document on the website
  • Avoid including revision dates or version numbers in file names
  • Use clear, simple, and consistent naming conventions:
    • Use lowercase letters
    • Avoid spaces and special characters
    • Use hyphens (-) or underscores (_) instead
    • Example: travel-policy.pdf
  • If multiple versions must be retained for compliance or historical purposes (e.g., financial statements), dates may be included in the file name:
    • Example: financial-statement-fy2024.pdf

Web Video

If you would like to link to or embed video on your web page we request that you use one of the following solutions:

YouTube

YouTube should be utilized if a video is for public consumption and does not need to reside within LSUHSC infrastructure. Please create an IT Service Request if you are interested in uploading videos to YouTube. Once your video is uploaded you would be able to copy the VideoID and use the embed code as shown below to place the video inside of the CMS.

Mediasite

Mediasite is a video hosting solution hosted by LSU Health New Orleans. This solution should be used when a video needs to be locked down so that only certain groups of user can view the content, or if the video needs to be hosted on internal resources. Open a Mediasite service request to get stared with leverage this video solution.

Optimizing Images for the Web

It is important to optimize images for web viewing.  Optimized image files save room on web servers and decrease web page load times.

Web Optimized Image Guidelines

Image Formats

  • Acceptable image formats:
    • JPG
    • GIF
    • PNG

Image Resolution

  • Images should be set to 72 ppi (pixels per inch)

Image Size

  • Images should be saved as the same size that they are set to display on the web page
  • For example an image that is set to display with a width of 500px should be saved as a 500px image on the web server.

Aspect Ratio

  • An image's aspect ratio should always be maintained. 
  • Maintaining aspect ratios keeps images from looking stretched/skewed on the web.

Tools for Optimizing Images

There are many services and programs that can be used to optimize images for the web.

Optimize PDFs for the Web

It is important to optimize PDFs for web viewing.  Optimized PDF files save room on web servers and decrease web page load times.

How to Optimize a PDF for web (Using Adobe Acrobat Pro)

  1. File > Save As >Optimized PDF
  2. From here choose "Audit space usage.." (top-right)  to find out exactly what is taking up the most space
  3. Use the options located in the PDF Optimizer to optimize the PDF based on the information retrieved from the audit
  4. Press OK and choose a location to save the file

Additional Tips for Optimizing PDFs

  • Optimizing images

    • It is important to note that large images inside a PDF are often the cause of large PDF files.  It may be necesary to go through and resize these images individually to get the best PDF optimization results.

  • Avoid using several different fonts

    • Each font that is used in a PDF adds additional data to the PDF file.  In order to get a smaller file size, use a limited number of fonts.

  • Recognize Text

    • When working with scanned PDF documents, recognizing document text allows users on the web to search the documents in browser.
      • In Adobe Acrobat select (In the right panel) Tools > Recognize Text > In this File
      • Following this Adobe Acrobat will scan the text. 
      • Be sure to save the PDF after this process is finished.