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Indiana University

New Media

Gateway Templates

Before downloading these templates, please review IU's Web Standards.

These templates were created to assist individuals in maintaining and creating university-wide organizational pages. The templates meet all IU Web standards—including priority 1 guidelines for accessibility as established by the World Wide Web Consortium— but have not yet been redesigned to reflect the Integrated Image Initiative guidelines.

Until new templates become available, units can download existing Web templates. These templates are primarily designed for departments and offices that serve multiple campuses and are considered university-wide units. Bloomington-only units should use the IU Bloomington template.

For questions about the templates, contact the ocs [at] indiana [dot] edu (IU Office of Creative Services).

About the Templates

These templates consist of many files. Although the files are separate, the content file contains programming that puts all of these elements together on the Web, a programming technique known as "Server Side Include" (SSI) statements. Use of SSI greatly simplifies site maintenance. Each page of a site shares a header, footer, and navigation files, so only one file has to be modified in order to update an entire site. For example, a 10-page site contains 10 content pages but only one header file, one footer file, and one navigation file.

SHTML files are the established naming system for HTML files that make use of SSIs. Changing the ".shtml" file extension to anything else could cause the includes to function improperly.

The template styles are controlled by a Cascading Style Sheet that is included with the download. Its function is to control the font, font colors and sizes, margin widths, and page layout. This makes formatting your site unnecessary, as the style sheet will control all elements of the page. The only formatting you will need to apply are bold, italics, and underlines.

Note regarding IIS servers: In the HTML on index.shtml, page1.shtml, and page2.shtml, you will notice the following code: <!--#include virtual="xxx.shtml"-->.

If your department is using a Windows-based IIS Web server instead of the Veritas central server to host its site, you will need to change that statement to: <!--#include file="xxx.shtml" -->.

Download the Templates

The template folder can be downloaded to your computer. It will then require that you unzip or expand the file. There are three templates from which to choose. Template A-1 is identical to template A, but is built using a Macromedia Dreamweaver template and is Contribute compatible, in addition to being editable in all other HTML editing tools. Templates A and B look like the images below.

Template A     Template B

Download the Files:

After you have downloaded and unzipped the appropriate template, go to your template's instruction page to learn how to manage and customize your department's Web site.