Media Best Practices and Policies

Media Use Policy

• Always include Alt Text with your images for 508 accessibility compliance.
• See https://moz.com/learn/seo/alt-text for a good explanation and some examples of Alt Text.
• Use media that you are reasonably sure you have permission to use.
• Be prepared to remove media upon request if there is a copyright infringement complaint or if it is otherwise used without permission.

Image Specifications

• See our Image Use Guidelines
• Resolution
• (Header) Slider
• Upload original image, then (within WordPress) resize/crop to:
• Width - 1400px
• Height - Anything you want, but keep it consistent amongst all of your slider images or it will look bad. For reference, the main website uses 500px for its slider images.
• Everything else
• Upload original quality images whenever possible. WordPress will automatically generate a variety of scaled versions for you.
• File Types
• JPG - For photos.
• PNG - For drawings, graphs, logos, etc.

Videos

• Do not upload videos within WordPress. They will be removed.
• See our Embedding Best Practices and Policies
• Submit an iTicket for livestreams - make sure to include the video url, the URL of where you want to the video to be embedded, and the placement of the video.

 

Finding Images to Use on Your Website

• Wikimedia Commons - Database of millions of image and media files. Most are freely usable, but check licenses first for any restrictions. How to use an image from Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia
  

• Flickr Commons - Collection of openly available images.
  

• Shared Shelf Commons - A free, open-access library of images.
  

• Open Collections - Database of Museum collections that are openly available without permissions.
  

• Pixabay - All images and videos on Pixabay are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0. You may download, modify, distribute, and use use without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist - even for commercial purposes.
  
  
• Unsplash - All photos published on Unsplash are licensed under the Unsplash license, which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash.