Promoting your web pages
How to quote your web page address | Website or web pages? | "Features for ..." | Special feature buttons | Corporate visual identity
To find your web pages, users need to know (or find) your web address. To help them do this, make the city council's website an integral part of your service area's communications and marketing strategy.
How to quote your web page address
Don't just quote www.salford.gov.uk home page address
A
common mistake on publicity materials is to quote just www.salford.gov.uk as a nod towards the existence
of web pages that might be of interest to the reader. In fact what you're doing is effectively saying
to the reader "go take a look at our website - we've given you the address of the
home page of the site and you can find your own way from there".
Quote a unique address on publicity materials and press
releases
You should, wherever possible, promote complementary web content
for any council publications including press releases, and you can do this by quoting the web page address
as www.salford.gov.uk/<pagename> (where <pagename> is the name that has been assigned to
a particular web page. There's no need to add ".htm" as a suffix (or indeed http:// as a prefix).
This is because every page on our website has to have a unique page name.
The following table provides an example:
Instead of: http://www.salford.gov.uk/business/landprop/forsale/currentlandforsale.htm
Just quote: www.salford.gov.uk/currentlandforsale
Sometimes the page you want to quote on materials will have a name which, to the public, would be meaningless gobbledegook - take www.salford.gov.uk/nid as a good example.
The problem with over-long web page addresses isn't just about presentation and simplicity - there's a practical aspect too. The shorter (and more meaningful) the web address is, the less likely it is that a mistake would be made in either reproducing it elsewhere or when typing it into a web browser's address bar.
In such instances if you contact the web team. We can rename specific pages so that you can quote something more meaningful. In the example above we might, say, change it to www.salford.gov.uk/notifiablediseases or similar, in consultation with you.
Top tip
Before
you quote a website address on publicity materials check that the address you're going to quote
actually works! Type the page address into your browser and see what happens. If you don't get the expected
result, you'll have saved yourself later (possibly costly) embarrassment.
Do I have "a website" or "web pages"?
There's nothing wrong with promoting your own "website" though it is important to understand the distinction between a website and web pages.
Salford City Council has a website (www.salford.gov.uk) whilst individual directorates, business units and collaborative projects have web pages on the city council's website.
A good example of this in practice is the BBC which has a corporate website at www.bbc.co.uk. Individual programmes and promotions have a unique web address that enables a web visitor to quickly access what is referred to as a website but which is, in reality, a series of web pages. For example, www.bbc.co.uk/holiday.
Significant new collections of web pages are added for a short time to the "Features for ..." section on the salford.gov.uk home page, and automatically added to the site's general navigation structure.
Inclusion on the "Features" section is administered by the web team, so if you want your content to be listed you'll need to bring the new content to their attention of the team by mailing webmaster@salford.gov.uk with details.
There is a panel of special feature buttons on the lefthand side of the website's home page which can be used to draw attention to particular web pages. In the web team we refer to these as "hotlinks".
Up to five features buttons can be displayed at any one time. The web team will accept 'advance bookings' for a particular set of pages to be featured on this panel on a given date (or date range). Further information.
The council's default website address (www.salford.gov.uk) forms part of the council's visual identity and appears by default on stationery, some signage and other materials.
Nevertheless, any promotional activity for your own service area should highlight the fact that dedicated web pages are available and a high level web page address included in associated materials such as a press release or brochure.
Generally speaking it is better to promote the top level of your collection of web pages rather than to draw attention to one specific web page.
This page was last updated on 19 June 2008
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