Template Information

UMD Web Page Templates

Thank you for your interest in the templates and the new UMD home page design. You may use and customize all of the files as much or as little as you like for your site. The photoshop files have several image layers in them to choose from. If you have any questions, feel free to call or email Andrew Manteuffel (726-6927, amanteuf@d.umn.edu).

Get the files

All of the Dreamweaver templates, PhotoShop files, and Stylesheets are available for download with a brief description.

Changes from previous templates

There are a few significant changes that you might need to know if you are planning on just making modifications to your existing templates vs replacing them with the new ones.

• The main stylesheet file is now /base/stylesheets/2nd.css but most of the same class and id names are still being used.
• The header, page name banner, and footer are all removed from the table structure.
• The light blue banner with the page name is now just a <div id="bannerID"> instead of <div class="bannerID" id="bannerBack"> which is simpler and more logical.
• The navigation area is now styled with an id="nav" instead of a class="nav"
• The photo area is now styled with an id="photo" instead of a class="photo"

Header and Footer

The header and footer (required by the University Branding Policy) are available as a set of virtual includes for use in your own templates or plain HTML/PHP pages. The benefit of using these includes, which are being used in the template files below as well, is that you don't have to worry about changing your pages if the look or content of the header/footer is modified in the future. The changes, if any, will be made to the includes and your pages will immediately have the revised header/footer without any effort on your part.
Read how to use the header/footer includes.

About the Templates

• The templates satisfy all of the requirements found in the U of MN Brand Web Requirements and Guidelines.
• The templates meet U.S. Section 508 Guidelines for accessibility.
• The templates use a "liquid" design. This allows the page to expand and contract to take full advantage of the width of the browser window and avoid having to side-scroll in narrow windows.
• The template files are XHTML 1.0 Transitional. UMD is encouraging the use of standards compliant web browsers and as such, will be using XHTML and CSS for future pages. Tables used for layout purposes are also minimized.
• There are 8 template files since not all content will have room for the photo or the navigation links column or both. The templates are named in three parts, "nav", "1col/2col", and "pic" separated by an underscore. Names that contain "nav" have the navigation links column, names with "1col" or "2col" have 1 or 2 columns of content respectively, and names with "pic" have the photo column. This will make it easier to keep pages in templates since you will not have to detach a page from a template in order to get rid of an extra column.
• There is a breadcrumb class in the stylesheet. Using breadcrumbs will help users find their way around your site especially if they come to your site from a search engine. You can see how these are done by looking at this page with breadcrumbs. The one column template "1col" has a sample breadcrumb in it.
• The stylesheet has comments in the file to help understand what each section of code affects on the web page.
• All of the images and stylesheets that are referenced by the templates are in their final destinations on the web server and will not be moving.

Read more benefits of using the UMD templates.

For more information about putting web pages on the UMD server, see Creating, Storing, and Linking Pages to the UMD Web Site.