The Web is a potential force of revolutionary change in education. Its spectacular growth has been aided, in part, by the growing number of educational web pages. Kuwait University (KU) colleges, scientific departments, supporting departments, centers, offices and personals had realized the importance of the web as a core element in education. As a result of that we have currently around 60 websites that comes under umbrella of KU domain (i.e. kuniv.edu) and that number is expected to grow steadily in the coming years. Unfortunately, most of these websites were based on scattered individual efforts which reflected directly on the loss and weakness of the unified look among the whole body of Kuwait University. Such individualism made such web sites differ in look, content and structure. The branding of Kuwait University as a single strong educational entity depends heavily on such unification. Unfortunately, such branding is very weak nowadays. The objective of this document is to set the guidelines that will lead KU organizations to unify their website in terms of content, structural and navigation models, webpage layout and look, and website structure.
The project team uses the following methodology to come up with such guideline document:

1. A statistical analysis of the university current web pages; that includes studying the current situation differences, similarities, technologies, look, and content.
2. Examining similar international efforts into with similar scopes. Different unification projects across international universities are studied.
3. Research carried out regarding such issues and best-practice in web site design and structuring taken into consideration.

This document is divided into 8 sections including this summary. Section 2 defines the purpose of this document. Section 3 explains the coverage policy for such guideline document. Section 4 describes KU general organization structure and how this organization structure should be mapped in designing the KU sites. Section 5 describes the recommendation for web pages layout. Section 6 gives a set of guidelines to make a web site universally accessible. Section 7 discusses guidelines for recommended content to be included in website. Section 8 sets the security mechanism guidelines that should followed by KU sites administrators.

Purpose

The purpose of this policy is to describe certain visual and information elements and their usage that are required for all official Kuwait University World Wide Web pages.