Digital Communications

• Strategize and create content on smith.edu, including webpages for academic departments and programs, Smith administrative offices, alum relations and development, and Smith Today
• Execute online promotion and livestreaming for major college-wide events (such as Commencement)
• Maintain Smith’s official social media channels and strategize various campaigns

• Develop personal sites for faculty or sites for class or academic projects (contact ITS)
• Create sites for events sponsored by academic departments (add a page to your department site or create a Facebook page instead)
• Produce complex database projects or forms (contact ITS)
• Help with server or software issues (contact ITS)
• Maintain Smith events calendar
• Maintain Smith Directory

While we review all submitted content for spelling, grammar, and clarity before we add it to the website, here are a few tips to keep in mind when drafting your content to expedite the process and reduce the risk of mistakes.

• Follow the Smith Style Guide for general rules of punctuation, spelling, capitalization and usage.
• Watch verb tenses. Keep in mind what information will become dated and submit content changes to the webteam as needed.
• Keep content short and scannable—users take in a lot of information online and their attention spans are often limited. Use bulleted lists where appropriate, and keep headlines and subheads concise and descriptive. 
• Be specific and offer useful information. Avoid institutional language and jargon.
• The website is not used as an archive of outdated information or events.
• Content must not include personal or political statements, opinions, or potentially inflammatory remarks. For more information, please read the Website & Content Management User Policy.

Content & Style

Videos on smith.edu should be professional and high quality. Any text or logos appearing onscreen during the video must be in compliance with brand guidelines. Communications & Marketing reserves the right to edit or omit submitted videos as they see fit.

Videos may not:

• Contain verbal or written material making political statements or endorsements.
• Contain verbal or written material with sensitive, offensive, or inappropriate language, including but not limited to profanity, private or confidential information, and obscenity.
• Be composed of a series of photographs—if you have photos you would like to post to a web page, please read over the photography guidelines and fill out the website update request form.
• Be recordings of PowerPoint presentations or other slide shows.
• Violate in any way the content guidelines set forth in the Website and Content Management User Policy.

Videos will ideally:

• Be well-lit, in focus, and well-composed.
• Be quickly recognizable as having been taken on Smith’s campus, whether in a house, in an academic building, or outside near some sort of campus landmark.
• Not feature empty rooms or hallways—whenever possible, people should be shown interacting with physical spaces.

Specifications

Videos should be as high-resolution as possible when sent to the web team for posting—our minimum acceptable resolution is 1080p.

Aspect Ratio

All videos posted to Smith’s website should be filmed in landscape mode. Videos filmed in portrait mode should be reserved for posting on social media, if appropriate.

Hosting

The college’s content management system can accommodate videos hosted through either Vimeo or YouTube. Videos hosted on other platforms cannot be used on Smith’s website.

Accessibility

In order to comply with WCAG 2.0 accessibility requirements, all videos must be accompanied by complete and accurate .srt or .vtt captions.

Legal Use

Only use videos that the college owns the copyright to—those taken by a Smith employee for work purposes, those taken by a videographer the college hired for a specific event, or those for which the college has explicit, documented permission for web usage.

Videos containing copyrighted audio are not allowed.

If you’re unsure whether we have permission to use a video, it will not be posted to the website until written permission can be obtained.