Naming Conventions

URL Conventions

Our recommendation is that organizational units such as Colleges, Departments, Offices will generally have the url www.wwu.edu/unitname such as:

• http://www.wwu.edu/huxley
• http://www.wwu.edu/atus
• http://www.wwu.edu/mcl

This maintains the branding convention that University Relations would like to see, i.e. that the main Western brand comes first, followed by the sub-brand.

In some cases this is not entirely possible, but this is the goal. Cases that may differ from this include:

• groups that were issued a unitname.wwu.edu url before this convention was established. We would like to see these move to a more conventional format and the change of url may be required before the unit will be able to take advantage of space on the CampusWeb server.
• groups that are not on the campusweb servers and so have a different server name such as west.wwu.edu/unitname - but this is often addressed by issuing an alias. For example ATUS is on the West server (west.wwu.edu/atus) but has been given an alias of www.wwu.edu/atus .
• Sites that are on an externally hosted server and require a subdomain for ease of DNS allocation (ipe.wwu.edu) . These are generally temporary solutions and can also receive the www.wwu.edu/unitname address which can be redirected to the external address.

There are legitimate subdomains on campus, but these are reserved for applications and tools, not for websites for organizational units. Some of these include:

• search.wwu.edu for the search engine
• bullseye.wwu.edu for the targeting messaging tool