Last Updated December 2024
Please be aware of these requirements if you are considering doing web work on your own or hiring a contractor. If you are hiring, you will need to include these things in the scope of work for the bid.
Accessibility
The Web Accessibility Policy legally requires our websites to be accessible to people with disabilities. The university runs an automated scan on all of our websites, which requires them to get a score above 90% accessible. The scanning tool is not perfect and sometimes we see false positives or false negatives so it’s helpful to have an expert do a manual review as well.
The COFA web team can help advise and answer any questions about the legal requirement. Before your final approval of the work, or perhaps during logical stages of the project, we are happy to give a quick evaluation. We can run the site through the automated testing and let you know how it scores.
Branding
University and departmental branding is another area you will want to have addressed before the new site is launched. The minimum you need to know about university branding requirements is here: https://brand.utexas.edu. However, it is worth checking with your department or unit Communications teams. They will want to know about your project in order to help with promotion.
Ownership & Access
When people leave the college we want to make sure college related content is not “orphaned” on the web that we can’t mitigate. We encourage people to use Campus Pantheon hosting, if possible.
Sites hosted off campus and outside of campus oversight are at higher risk for issues with contracts. Understanding policy and legal issues is beyond the scope of the web team and we recommend getting assistance from business and legal professionals to advise on any Service or User Level Agreements and Privacy Statements of external vendors.
At the very least, make sure more people in the college have access and credentials. We suggest creating an entry in Stache to share passwords and logins with additional faculty or staff in the college. We’re happy to be one of these fallback credential sharers.
Privacy, Use, Security, FERPA, etc.
The other policies are pretty standard and may change. Here’s a not all inclusive list of links that could be relevant depending on website content:
- University’s Acceptable Use Policy.
- University ISO Policies on Cloud Services
- UT Web Privacy Policy – http://www.utexas.edu/web-privacy-policy
- University Records Management Policies and Procedures – https://records.utexas.edu/
- The University of Texas at Austin Records Retention Schedule
Learn More
We have an entire section of this instruction site dedicated to requirements. Contact the campus Web Consulting service for more advise and recommendations.
