Answers Pages Best Practices

1) Orient the visitor.

• On the home page for your unit, briefly provide the main department information: location, phone number, general email if you have one and link back to public facing website in case someone is not looking for internal information.

• Also on the home page, provide an index below of the information and pages in this section with links.

• While the links on the home page do not need to repeat the name of the unit that appears in the H1, the child pages that they link to should include the name of the unit. This is to benefit visitors who land on child pages via search or a link and may not know that they are looking at information specific to  one unit.

2) Include all internally-facing information for the Maxwell community here ... that is details for current students on how to do stuff... declare a major, apply for an award, sign up for a community placement, etc. ) As a general rule, the public facing website at maxwell.syr.edu can and should promote those things that are compelling to prospective students and external audiences but not go deep into the details of how to do something – instead keep the language on maxwell.syr.edu promotional and high level and link off to the details for current students here as appropriate.

3) Do not repeat information that already appears elsewhere for which you are not the authoritative source. Instead, link off to the authoritative source publication. That helps to ensure that our pages stay up-to-date with the latest information as provided by the source. It also helps to mitigate confusion caused by incomplete or competing information appearing across different pages.