Information Resources & Technology (IRT)–

Developing Your Site in IRT's Prototyping Area

All new sites are prototyped under IRT's staging domain.. Request setup through the Web Help form. IMPORTANT: All setup is handled by IRT - do not attempt to reverse-engineer the format on your own server or ours. IRT will send you the URL of your prototype site. Do not link the prototype from any public site. Feel free to send the URL to others by email for review.

By now you should have your own namespace, which will be a key part of your site's final Web address. You should feel comfortable with it, because it will be difficult to change once your site is published. Use the stationery and CSS styles we have made available to you to build your site.

1.Policies You Must Know: To ensure the integrity of Web sites on our server, we ask that our web-authors respect our Web publishing policies. To ensure design consistency, all sites should use the standard Stanford Medicine format. Please do not break pages out of the Stanford Medicine format. Contact us If you'd like to change the overall structure of your pages or incorporate various programming languages or a database.

2.Choose your software: You have a choice of two tools for publishing to your site. Adobe Contribute is a browser-like content publishing application that is most practical for updates to text, links and images. Adobe Dreamweaver is meant for more involved development tasks. If your site will have a complex structure, Dreamweaver will offer more flexibility. You will need to have the software installed before you can begin editing. Read More »

3.Get training: Be sure to view our comprehensive online training with multimedia. Or register for one of our in-person classes to prepare for publishing to Stanford Medicine Web sites with Dreamweaver.

4.Begin work: We will contact you when your access is ready. You will now be ready to start publishing to your site. WebDAV provides a secure mechanism for Stanford Medicine web-authors to access web sites using a SUNet ID and password. If you choose Dreamweaver, you will need to configure it to establish a connection using the WebDAV URL provided to you.

  • If you have worked on any previous version of the site, be sure to set aside your older local folder. You should not upload older files to the site. Instead, start over with a fresh, blank directory on your local computer to hold your local site files. You will need to "get" all the site's files from the server before making changes.
  • You will need a local copy of the Templates resources for your site in order to preview your pages properly. More »
  • All new pages should be created by duplicating and renaming existing ones. More »

Notes: Your prototype should be organized, professional and ready for publication before final review. Placeholder pages marked "coming soon" and links to them will be suppressed prior to publication (you can re-activate them after adding content). All tab/topic home pages must have content; placeholder home pages can delay publication.

5.Your site must be reviewed and published to it's final location by IRT. Once you have finished building your site, you can request review via the Web Help Form. IRT reserves the right to make changes to conform with the overall style and technical requirements of the Stanford Medicine Web.

More prototyping resources

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