This page contains notes concerning the global appearance of Confluence, templates, and generally administration guidelines for appearance, campus-wide. it is  not open to anyone outside User Services and OLI/FacTS.  The purpose is to create a set of guidelines for creating Confluence content that can be the basis for campus-wide use, tutorials, workshops, and so forth.  

ITS pages should model these practices as far as possible.

We want campus users to generally follow these standards because:

• Continuity means it is much easier for us to troubleshoot problems for them.
• We can ensure that the macros and arrangements they use will look good on a variety of screens: desktop, notebook, tablet, phone, and so on. 

On the other hand, we should be careful not to insist users stick to a narrow list of tools, options, and content arrangements, because:

• We are selling the internet as a diverse, flexible and versatile way of conveying content and promoting engagement.  Telling people they must follow a strict style guide offers them much less incentive to bother with it.  (Simply touting the efficiencies of paperless communication has a poor record for on-boarding ordinary users to digital technology.)
• We will need to police this, occasionally telling people they "must" change their sites, and "must not" deviate.  The more of these kinds of conversations that happen, the more disaffection we can anticipate among users.

I suggest:

• offer tutorial content showing the basics of building attractive content: technical as well as design considerations: follow these standards, and your content is effective.  You don't need spend time learning more.
• develop a series of videos showing how to use the basic features to build content.  In one-on-one sessions or workshops these are the features we demonstrate.    
• indicate that other, "more advanced" features are available, but should only be used with a thorough commitment to testing (time and effort). We can assist with this process. 

Developing a best-practice stylesheet will require testing to ensure consistency and reliability of macros, markup, or content arrangement.  Below are various features we should consider:

Themes 

Currently (5.8) we have only two available, and they are similar.  Purchased themese are expensive (up to $2500).  We can install a theme builder, but this may bring additional complications and compatibility issues.  If we upgrade to Confluence 6, our themes created may need to be rebuilt.  

The trouble with the current available themes is that they have a sidebar visible on desktop only.  This can provide a table of contents for a space, but that TOC must be duplicated in the body of the page, because it (or the child pages list at the bottom of the desktop page) is not visible in Confluence Mobile.  

Tools Available to Users

Headings

Headings are easy to explain.  The Table of Contents Macro is easy to explain, and uses headings.  

Panels

Panels are easy(ish) to explain, and produce callouts that are brightly colored (unlike tables, which are limited to pastels).  

Tables

Tables as standard form of organization, especially for tutorials.  Recommended.

Testing:

• Android: Chrome browser.  Tables usable.  Look OK.  

Columns

Several ways to use columns. They aren't necessarily difficult to construct, but they complicate views on various devices.  I see this as an advanced feature, not recommended for most users.   

Macros

Children.  Simply lists pages in space.  I strongly recommend this for the home page for each space, as well as parent pages for offices.  "Page Tree" purports to do the same thing, and we used it in the past, but it is not visible in the mobile browser version.