Special website checklist

Table of Contents:

If you are interested in learning more about styling and layout, read the guide.

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Remove Oxford commas.
The word “the” in “The Michigan Daily” should be capitalized.
The full style guide can be found in the Library.
Credit the team of designers and developers in a byline. The byline should be prominently displayed. Sort the byline in order of greatest to least amount of contributions.

Add the Engineering and Leadership GitHub teams to the repository with write or maintain access. Refrain from adding individuals directly, unless there are special circumstances.
Ensure that the GitHub repository for the special website is private.
Use Lora and Open Sans, usually. Those are our brand fonts for websites.
Ensure that there is no horizontal scroll on the website, unless intended.
Ensure that data files (such as CSV and JSON files) are not pushed to GitHub. This is particularly important for sensitive data files. Use sink and Google Drive to share data files.
Use the website on desktop and mobile devices across different operating systems. Notably, test on iOS, Android, macOS and Windows. Evaluate the website on Google Chrome and Safari. Test on your actual mobile device as much as possible.
Run a Chrome DevTools Lighthouse audit to surface basic performance and accessibility issues. Conduct the audit on a production or preview build.
Use Chrome DevTools network throttling to test the website under slower network conditions (e.g., to mimic using the website while not connected to strong WiFi).
Share the project internally in Slack before publication to get feedback. Facilitate sharing by deploying to the test subdomain.

Use a screen reader to navigate your website and ensure it is accessible to people with visual impairments and use their keyboards to navigate. Add labels and screen reader context as necessary.
Ensure that most of the text on the screen is at least 16 pixels in size.
Ensure all images have alternative text.

Create a slug in the following format: year/special-title.
(e.g., 2023/writing-in-the-digital-dark-age)
Slugs should generally be short. The only special pages that should break this format are Arts B-Sides, which follow this slug format: bside/year/bside-title
(e.g., bside/2022/fashion).
Ensure that there is a social media preview image.
Ensure there is an appropriate meta description and title. Ensure these work on the Open Graph Protocol and on Twitter. You can test this by sending a Slack message.
Set up a WordPress redirect, for most cases.

Deploy to https://mic.michigandaily.com with sink.
Use the https://mic.michigandaily.com Google Analytics 4 tag. You can refer to previous special repositories or to the Google Analytics website.
Set the URL in the GitHub repository description to the deployed page. This is beneficial for associating a repository with a website.

Deploy to https://specials.michigandaily.com with sink.
Use the https://specials.michigandaily.com Google Analytics 4 tag. You can refer to previous special repositories or to the Google Analytics website.
Set the URL in the GitHub repository description to the deployed page. This is beneficial for associating a repository with a website.