Guidelines for Designing Preservation-Friendly Websites

The design of your website largely influences our ability to preserve it successfully. Please keep these guidelines in mind--which were developed based on similar guidelines at the Library of Congress, Columbia University, and the Smithsonian Institution--when developing your website to ensure its reliable capture and rendering. To assess your website’s ability to be archived successfully, visit ArchiveReady. Complete this form to recommend a website for preservation by the University Archives.

• Provide a standard link to all website content (including pages, images, videos, documents); links should be in HTML/XHTML format, rather than embedded in JavaScript or Flash.

• Avoid proprietary formats (when possible) for important content, especially the home page- if you use a proprietary format make sure it is widely used and well documented (such as docx and PDF). Open standards and open file formats are generally the best choices for preservation.

• Do not create home pages relying heavily on images or animations such as Flash, but if you do create such pages, also provide alternative text-only HTML versions.

• Follow accessibility standards to render the site usable by everyone and accessible to the Internet Archive’s Heritrix crawler. See the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) for more information and also consult WCAG 2.0 Level AA.

• Include a user and/or xml Sitemap; sitemaps providing links to all content in a website help to ensure that crawlers will capture an entire site.

• Omit robots.txt exclusions or limit them to areas not needed for archiving (such as calendar functions and databases). Please note that web archiving requires crawling of stylesheets and images; please be sure that directories containing these files are not restricted.

• Where feasible, ensure that objects (video, audio, etc.) are embedded within your site or page and not embedded in third-party websites; the Heritrix crawler is unable to crawl some content from certain third-party sites (Vimeo, among others).

• Maintain stable URLs for particular content and redirect from old URLs to new URLs when necessary.

• State the type of character encoding; use an HTML meta tag or XML docytype declaration to indicate the type of encoding that should be used for proper rendering of the webpage.