Guidelines for Web Page Creation at www.gnu.org

This is a general guide for everyone who wishes to write a web page for the GNU project web server, www.gnu.org. There are several other guides that are important, one of the most important ones is the FSF HTML Style Sheet in http://www.gnu.org/server/fsf-html-style-sheet.html. A list of the others are in http://www.gnu.org/server/standards/readme_index.html.

No pages on the GNU project web server should ever make any references to non-free software or non-free documentation. This is VERY important.

The boilerplate that is used for all our pages in is http://www.gnu.org/boilerplate.html. A good start when writing a web page is to use that boilerplate and follow the instructions in it. Please delete the unneeded comments as you go. It makes the HTML source file easier for later maintainers to work with. You should also check for specialized versions of boilerplate.html in the current directory, and those above it.

When writing a page for a certain program, we want to have some basic information on such a page:

A description on what the program does
Where to download the program in question
Where to report bugs
FAQs and documentation if they are available
Installation instructions

The description should be long enough so that people can grasp the whole program, but not so long that they get bored by reading it. If a package consists of several smaller programs, it is best to write a general description of what type of programs that belong in the package and then write shorter descriptions for each program.

The GNU Project would like to host all web pages about a program, so if the main pages is currently on some other server, please consider moving them to the GNU project web server instead.

When you maintain a set of web pages, perhaps for a special program, on www.gnu.org, you should make sure that your name and email is listed in ~www/GNU.web-folk.html on gnudist. That way the webmasters will know who to contact if they need to make any changes to the web pages you maintain. Ask webmasters@gnu.org to add you, if you can't do it yourself. (Note that we don't publish ~www/GNU.web-folk.html on this web site because some volunteers might not want their email address exposed to spammers.)

Return to GNU's home page.

Please send FSF & GNU inquiries & questions to gnu@gnu.org. There are also other ways to contact the FSF.

Please send comments on these web pages to webmasters@gnu.org, send other questions to gnu@gnu.org.

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Updated: $Date: 2005/05/05 19:37:20 $ $Author: novalis $