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Technical Regulations for USAID Mission Web Sites Hosted by USAID Washington
USAID missions should work with their respective bureaus and LPA/PIPOS and relevant information on the main USAID site at www.usaid.gov. The primary purpose for a mission to have its own website is to do outreach and perform services to the immediate community it is serving. Missions are strongly encouraged to host their sites on USAID/Washington's server. If for reasons of bandwidth or technology mission sites cannot be hosted in Washington, mission sites must follow these guidelines.
Mission sites, either hosted on USAID/Washington servers and hosted remotely, will be assigned a subdomain URL by LPA/PIPOS of the format countryname.usaid.gov.
Missions are welcome to use the external site template provided here.
Missions are encouraged to structure their website content according to the guide provided here.
Missions must follow these guidelines:
General
- The site must include the use of the country subbrandmark found here. The country subbrand must appear in the upper left corner of the homepage, generally following the standards outlined in the USAID Graphics Standards Manual.
- The site homepage must include a link to http://www.usaid.gov/
- The USAID/Washington web server is case-sensitve. Image and link references must be coded correctly or they will not function - img05.jpg and IMG05.jpg and Img05.JPG are not the same filename. We recommend using all lowercase filenames to avoid confusion.
- Your site will reside at http://www.usaid.gov/xx, where xx is a two-letter code for your mission. Sites must be coded accordingly, with image and link references relative to this directory structure.
- Links to pages on other web sites must be relevant to the content of the page. External links should be vetted by a direct-hire subject matter expert for consistency with agency programs and must be checked frequently to ensure that they are current and correct. All links to sites not residing on a .gov server must utilize the "Goodbye" script:
<a href="/cgi-bin/goodbye?http://www.externalsite.com/page.html">. This script must only be used on HTML pages, as it will not function correctly from PDF, Word, or other downloadable documents.
- URLs that contain nonalphanumeric characters, such as those on database-driven web sites, can become truncated by the goodbye script and not function. To fix this, you must add the prefix url= to the beginning of the url and change all special characters to their percent-encoded escape characters. A correct link would look like:
<a href="/cgi-bin/goodbye?url=http://www.samplesite.gov/search/search.do?oppId=12345%26mode=VIEW" >.
- Links to content presented in a format other than HTML, such as PDF, MS Word, Wordperfect, MS Excel, and other formats, must be labeled with the file type and file size.
- Links to PDF files must include information on the file's creation date and last-modified date. We recommend placing this information in the
title attribute of the <a> tag.
- No advertisement that implies that USAID endorses any specific commercial product, commodity, or service will be permitted. This includes the contractor who has constructed the site. For further clarification, please see the OMB Guidance on this policy at www.webcontent.gov.
Accessibility
- All pages give persons with disabilities access to information that is comparable to the access available to others by being Section 508 compliant. A few examples of Section 508 requirements are explained briefly below, but mission sites must comply with ALL Section 508 guidelines listed here.
- The most basic idea with Section 508 is that there must be a text equivalent for every non-text element provided via "alt" tags or additional text. Non-text elements include:
- images (including those used as list bullets and spacers)
- graphical representations of text (including symbols)
- image map regions
- animations (e.g., animated GIFs)
- applets and programmatic objects
- ascii art
- graphical buttons
- sounds (played with or without user interaction)
- stand-alone audio files
- audio tracks of video
- video
- Pages that present data in tables must be coded so it can be understood with a screen reader (i.e: "scope" or "id" attribute.)
- Pages must be navigable without the use of a mouse (ie: tab, arrow and return keys.)
- Remember that the information in the "alt" attribute must be equivalent to the information provided in the non-text element -- an example of an appropriate "alt" attribute might be:
<img src="globe.gif" height="100" width="150" alt="Image of the globe, with Africa highlighted">
Privacy and Security
- You must have a link to the standard USAID Privacy Policy at www.usaid.gov/privacy.html and standard USAID machine-readable Privacy Policy, unless your site collects and/or uses information in a way that is not consistent with the standard USAID policy. The Agency Notice from November 9, 1999 describes what must be included. If you are targeting an audience of children below the age of 13, you must comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
- No cookies are allowed.
- Staff directories, group photos or head shots of staffers or contractors, and listing of individuals on contact pages is not permitted, as these pose a high security risk to mission staff and their families in the current environment. Photos of highly visible staff, such as mission directors speaking at public events, are permitted. Photos of USAID personnel and contractors working in the field are also permitted, but should avoid revealing identities to the greatest extent possible.
Titles and Metadata
- Each file must include a title in the
<title> tag. Links to pages without titles (or with malformed titles) that appear in the daily updates page will be removed and risk not being indexed.
- Document titles must adhere to the following format:
<title>USAID/[country_name] [Topic]: [Item] <title>
where [Topic] is a term indicating the page's subcategory in the USAID web site, and [Item] is a sufficient description of the document you are posting.
- All pages of the site must include a last-updated date. This can be generated manually, or by an automatic SSI script. We recommend including this in the page footer.
- Files must include the following five
<meta> tags in the document head:
- Responsible Official: name and bureau/division
- Author: name and bureau/division
- Description: a one-sentence summary of the document
- Keywords: Keywords should reflect the topics covered in the page content. At least one keyword should be selected from the topic list presented above. Other keywords should then be selected from the USAID Thesaurus, which can be found at dec.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNACD400.pdf.
- Posted: mm/dd/yyyy
- Language: xx
- The language meta tag must use the syntax
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="xx"/> where xx is a two-letter code (or multiple codes, separated by commas) from the list of ISO 639 letter codes. The language meta tag is used to decribe the primary intended audience of the page. Pages intended for use by more than one language group should use multiple languages in the meta tag. Pages intended for use by one audience but that contains elements in another language - for example, a page of Spanish phrases for English-speaking travellers, should use English in the meta tag. Elements within a page that are presented in other languages, such as the individual Spanish phrases in the above example, should employ the HTML lang="xx" attribute, so that this content will be parsed correctly by screen readers and search engines. For example, a page that lists press releases in English and Arabic would use the lang attribute thusly:
<a lang="en" href="press/headline56.html">A Local Soccer Legend Trains Palestinian Coaches</a><br>
<a lang="ar" href="press/arheadline56.html">أسطورة كرة قدم محلي يدرب المدربين الفلسطينيين</a>
- Meta tag keywords should be both site- and page-specific. It is not sufficient to replicate a single set of meta tags, with identical descriptions and keywords, throughout an entire site.
- Non-HTML files, particularly PDF files, must include this type of data to the full extent possible.
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