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URL Naming Share This OHSU Content

Acceptable Use and Formatting of Uniform Resource Locators (URL) for OHSU Branded Websites

Effective date: 15 March 2008

 

1. Applicability

This policy applies to all websites that are hosted, managed or maintained by OHSU and that carry the OHSU brand.

2. Requirements

A. Base URL format (Suffixes & Shortcuts)

The standard base URL for all OHSU websites is “www.ohsu.edu”. The URL for any website contained within the OHSU domain (e.g.  School of Medicine, Research, Library) will be of the form www.ohsu.edu/suffix.

Example: If the School of Medicine designates its website as “som” the publicly visible URL would be “www.ohsu.edu/som”.


  a.   URL Shortcut Naming Criteria

The URL suffix must conform to several criteria:

  • Must not exceed 20 characters in length.
  • Must be in all lower case
  • May not include spaces or special characters
  • May not include file extensions
  • May not include a port number
  • Must be professionally appropriate terminology
  • Must be specific to the content rather than general (i.e. www.ohsu.edu/bestclinic is not acceptable)
b. Suffix Assignment

Each department website will be assigned an appropriate shortcut suffix. Additional shortcut suffixes may be requested, if a business justification is presented. Disputes between the ownership of shortcut names will be resolved by Marketing.

c.   Target Location
Target location must be an OHSU-branded website.

d. Expiration or Time Limits on Shortcut URLs

Permanent Shortcuts will be created for:

  • Permanent websties
  • An extremely important news release (justification may be requested)
  • Recurring annual campaigns

Temporary Shortcuts will be created for:

  • Marketing campaigns or one-time events. Shortcut will expire 90 days after the event or end of the campaign.

  B. Subdomains (Prefixes)

While this prefix method of identification will still be used to identify specific applications hosted on dedicated hardware, any such URL should be redirected to a visible URL in the standard “shortcut” form described above.

 

C. Vanity URLS

 Vanity URLs are strongly discouraged and must be approved by OHSU Web Strategies and Marketing prior to being associated with any OHSU branded website. As part of this approval process, a business case justifying the need for a vanity URL must be submitted to Web Strategies with the URL request.  Personal URLs, such as “www.drdoctor.com” may not redirect to any OHSU branded, managed or hosted website, but must be associated with a non-ohsu website.

 

Every vanity URL must have an associated owner and billing code on record with Web Strategies.

D. URL Termination & Reassignment

 In general, OHSU URLs are granted in perpetuity to the requesting unit as long as the associated website is maintained in compliance with OHSU policy and procedure.

a.   Appropriation & Reassignment of a URL

In rare circumstances, a URL may be appropriated by OHSU Web Strategies or Marketing and reassigned in order to facilitate critical, strategic efforts. Such appropriation will not occur without a minimum of 30-days notice to the impacted unit.

b. End Dates
URLs used for a specific marketing campaign must have a sunset date, no more than 90 days past the final date of the event, at which time the URL suffix will be removed.

 

E. Approval

Both vanity URLs and standard form URLs must be approved by Web Strategies prior to being associated with a publicly accessible website. Requests are generally approved unless there is a conflict with a pre-existing website, a planned strategic initiative, or the requested URL does not conform to the guidelines outlined in this document. Requests should be submitted to webadmin@ohsu.edu. Web Strategies will review the URL request and notify the requestor of approval within five business days. Once approved, Web Strategies will facilitate the association of the new URL with the appropriate website. Shortcuts may be used to reference specific pages as well as subdomains.  Example: www.ohsu.edu/drdoctor may redirect to Dr. Doctor’s profile page within Health. Subdomain designations, such as “mysubdomain.ohsu.edu” must not be visible to the end user.