Guidelines for Writing Web Pages for www.gnu.org

This is a general guide for everyone who wishes to write a web page for www.gnu.org. There are several other important guides, most notably the GNU Website Guidelines. A list of other useful resources is also available.

No pages on the GNU Project web server should ever make any references to nonfree software or documentation. This is VERY important.

A good start when writing a web page is to use the boilerplate, and follow the instructions in it. Please delete the unneeded comments as you go. It makes the HTML source file easier for future maintainers to work with.

The web page(s) of your program should provide the basic information that users are looking for:

• 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, and
• installation instructions.

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

The GNU Project would like to host the web pages of all GNU programs. So, if the main pages of your program are currently on some other server, please consider moving them to our hosting facility (Savannah).