Introduction

This page seeks to provide basic information on designing Bahá`í web pages. Included are details about special characters, publicizing your site, Bahá`í graphics, and more. See the Bahá`í Studies / Internet category, documenting various letters from Bahá`í institutions about bulletin boards / discussion forums and web pages. The documents contained therein give some guidance on how such bulletin boards should be used, and how web pages should be treated:

Before getting into technical specifics of web page design, I would like to stress the importance of clearly identifying what your website is and who or what it represents. For example, if you are designing a site for a Bahá'í community, then it should clearly indicate not only the city's name, but also its wider geographic context (i.e. which province or state, and which country) because some people may come across your site from a search engine, and may have no idea what they are looking at otherwise. Similarly, it is always good to have introductory information on the Bahá'í Faith prominently placed. Another example that comes to mind is sites for conferences; these should very clearly indicate the dates and locations that the conference is to be held - visitors should not have to look for this information.

One of the the first things you should do is make links to other Bahá`í sites. You can find links on my site and use them, or you can even insert my search engine into your site. Following are some suggestions for how to link and what to link to:

• Linking to www.bahai.org is a great idea. It is the official site of the Bahá`í Faith and is quite extensive, and is available in a number of languages.
• You could put my search engine on your page
• You can link to Bahaindex.com
• Accented Bahá`í word list (courtesy of Mark Towfiq). The most obvious application is writing the word "Bahá`í" in HTML. For "á," use á, and for "í," use í.
• You might want up-to-date Bahá`í news on your site similar to what I have on my main page. You can include Bahaindex.com headlines by following these instructions. Alternately, you can include Baha'i World News Service headlines: www.bahaiworldnews.org has built a special feature that allows you to include recent headlines into your own HTML document. Click here to find out how.
• I would recommend that you not make links to Yahoo's Bahá`í section, or to any other public search engines for that matter, because they do not check to see whether a site is really a Bahá`í site in anything more than name.
• You may also want to link to TrueSeeker, a great Bahá`í Writings search engine.

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