Policy Narrative

Faculty.niu.edu is the official domain for professional websites for individual NIU faculty members. Faculty members may create and maintain their own sites or request support from the university’s central Office of Web and Internal Communications (Web Team) in the Division of Enrollment Management, Marketing and Communications.

Faculty may have sites within the university’s content management system (CMS) that are self-created and maintained or created and supported by the Web Team. The Web Team will create and support only those sites in the CMS in the official NIU branded faculty template (example branded faculty site). All other sites must be created and maintained by the faculty member. The Web Team coordinates CMS training (please see the Web and Internal Communications website for more details).

Faculty may also create and maintain sites outside of the university’s content management system (“external sites”). Resources can be found on the Web and Internal Communications website. The Web Team and NIU’s Division of Information Technology do not provide support for external sites.

Professional (as opposed to personal) websites created and maintained by faculty as a part of their employment with NIU (whether on the faculty.niu.edu domain or elsewhere) are not subject to the web standards and editorial guidelines. However, all such professional faculty websites must still comply with all other applicable university policy and law, including, but not limited to, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, the Rehabilitation Act Sections 504 and 508, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and copyright law.

Any technical requirements such as custom domain names for external sites or storage space for files within the web content management system must be coordinated with NIU’s Division of Information Technology and the Web Team.