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.webmastering.html#readme.
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.