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GCN Home > 11/29/05 web stories

NASA develops style sheets, tools for Web sites

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Last year, NASA decreed that its many Web sites should sport a common look and feel. Now the space agency has introduced a variety of tools to help NASA Web managers meet this goal.

Bryan Stephenson, a Web developer at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., has developed a set of style sheets that comply with the NASA format. Although originally designed for a Goddard Web site, other NASA agencies’ Web managers can slip their Web content into these style sheets as well. Stephenson used the World Wide Web Consortium’s Cascading Style Sheets format.

In addition to the style sheets, Goddard also offers an image generator that can produce navigational boxes and section headers with the correct color, sizes and fonts. Designed by Emma Antunes, Web manager for Goddard, this service is offered online through a Web site accessible for users from the .gov and .mil domains.

“If you don’t have graphics design expertise, this really helps ensure you meet style guidelines without having to go through any extra effort,” Antunes said. She spoke at the Website Evaluation conference held recently in Washington by the Digital Government Institute LLC of Bethesda, Md.

NASA headquarters has also set up a site to help its managers get with the new look. The site includes common image files and metadata tags, as well as CSS templates that developers can easily download and modify for their own sites.

These prefabricated style sheets and images may come in handy for NASA researchers and program managers, many of whom post their own Web pages but may not have the in-house expertise to design the pages to NASA’s new specifications.

NASA operates as a federated model, with different NASA centers working together to undertake agency missions. As a result, a vast number of different Web sites have sprung up dedicated to different programs and areas of research—with wildly diverging styles.

To help unify the appearance these pages, NASA headquarters released a guidebook in 2004 that defined how content should be placed and formatted on Web sites. Although the specifications detailed what Web sites should look like, NASA Web managers still had to translate them into operational code. This current crop of aids can help in this task.

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, Management, Web Strategies



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