The Site Excellence badge helps staffs ensure that their homepage design is meeting best practices and that at least one user knows how to use SNO’s design tools. Most of this badge is a checklist of different things our reviewers are looking for, but the staff must also create a design draft where they recreate a specific site design. The guidelines for this badge are below:
These standards must be met on both your live site AND the design draft.
1. DESIGN: The homepage has an image header.
2. DESIGN: The header image is high resolution, appropriately sized, and fits the homepage.
3. DESIGN: The homepage has little to no trapped/unplanned blank space.
4. DESIGN: The homepage has a cohesive design/style using no more than three different widget styles and consistent formatting throughout.
5. DESIGN: Use of animations is intentional and balanced.
6. DESIGN: The site has a customized favicon.
7. DESIGN: The homepage has a distinct color scheme featuring no more than three colors and the colors are complimentary.
8. DESIGN: The homepage features no more than three fonts.
9. DESIGN: The site has been designed using the FLEX Pro Site Designer and all Legacy Header and Footer elements have been removed. View this guide.
10. Create a design draft on your site and name it “Site Excellence.” On that draft you will need to recreate the homepage design seen at https://design.snodemo.com. Our reviewers are looking at the design tools, not the content, so it will still use your site name, your graphic header, your menus, your location for the weather, and whichever story categories you choose to display within the story widgets in the design draft. (NOTE: The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate proficiency in using SNO’s design tools. You do NOT need to push this design draft live. Feel free to delete or reset the design draft AFTER you earn the badge.)
11. IMAGES: A majority of the images are original images (not Creative Commons).
12. IMAGES: Photos, including ads, are consistently sized and display correctly. None appear to be oddly cropped, pixelated, edited, or broken.
13. IMAGES: Photos are original or press-release. Non-original photos are either used with permission or under fair use and credited appropriately.
14. IMAGES: The majority of stories on the homepage have photos and at least half of the stories on the category pages have photos.
15. IMAGES: All photos are individually captioned and credited, noting the individual photographer, including slideshows.
16. CONTENT: Categorization of stories is managed in a way that prevents obvious repetition of stories on the homepage.
17. CONTENT: A majority of links on the navigation bars are active and link to current content.
18. CONTENT: There is a staff page for the current school year that has individual staff profiles that link to the work of each staff member.
19. CONTENT: All staff profiles include a photo.
20. CONTENT: There is an About page that has been updated with information for the current school year.
21. CONTENT: The social media icons, when present, link to active social media accounts.
22. CONTENT: There are no obvious spelling or grammatical errors.
23. CONTENT: The publication uses either up style or down style exclusively for all headlines.
24: CONTENT: Content on the homepage is no more than three months old.