Website marquee guidelines
What is the primary function of the website marquee?
The primary function of the website marquee is to visually convey the theme and message of "college to career" through people-centric photographs. The marquee should showcase students actively engaged in their programs, being taught by renowned faculty members, and depict successful alumni in their careers. The goal is to tell a relatable visual story that prospective students can connect with, envisioning themselves on a similar path.
Effective marquee images should prioritize high-quality photographs of people, avoiding cluttered or distracting elements like buildings, flyers, or excessive text overlays. The images should be easy to discern and comply with accessibility regulations.
The marquee is not intended to serve as a bulletin board for news and events, as the website template provides dedicated sections for such content. The primary audience for the marquee is prospective students, and the focus should be on creating a compelling visual narrative that resonates with them and highlights the "college-to-career" journey.
How to create and edit marquee content
Marquee items are articles that have been designated with the type “special” in the editing tools. Anyone with editor privileges on a website can create and edit marquee content. The full documentation for working with your marquee can be found here. If you have any questions, please contact the CHSSWeb team.
Two design options
We offer two design options for the marquee, a modern card-style layout and a traditional rotating horizontal layout. The layout your website uses is set in the site configurations and can be changed by reaching out to the CHSSWeb team.
Option 1: Card marquee
The card marquee is the recommended marquee style for CHSS Departments. It is a modern, responsive, mobile-first design built to work seamlessly on a wide range of devices. The card marquee focuses on a college-to-career content strategy that highlights a program’s students, faculty, and alumni. This is the leading industry standard as it is SEO* friendly and compliant with accessibility standards.**
*What is SEO?: SEO—short for search engine optimization—is about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and make a decision about whether they should visit your site through a search engine.
**What are accessibility standards?
Inaccessible web content means that people with disabilities are denied equal access to information. An inaccessible website can exclude people just as much as steps at an entrance to a physical location.
The marquee should feature high-quality images/professional headshot of a student, faculty member and alum that are changed at a minimum each fall and spring semester. These should link to a story or profile about the person and provide links or resources to encourage further engagement with the department or program.
For example, a story about a student or alum may include links to relevant program pages or career information.
Option 2: Rotating horizontal marquee
The rotating horizontal marquee is a traditional marquee layout. It is recommended for CHSS units that may not have the content to drive the card style marquee, such as research centers, or have a specific use case where the card style marquee won’t work well for them. The recommended strategy for the rotating horizontal marquee focuses on highlighting key aspects of a program or center, bolstered by high-quality, compelling, people-centric imagery. With a rotating marquee, engagement decreases with each item, so the marquee is limited to 3 images.
An impactful rotating horizontal marquee uses high-quality, people-centric images to convey key aspects of the unit or a single high-quality image to identify the unit. These images can link out to content that further describes that aspect of the unit and provides additional pathways into the website.
For example, a slide that focuses on “Innovative Research” may link to an article about a research project and its impact that also contains links to how people can further engage with the work being done or donate to support it. A slide that focusses on flexible degree options may link to content describing those options that is bolstered by student or alumni stories that demonstrate real-world examples of those flexible program options.
Image requirements
Regardless of which marquee style a website uses, having high-quality, compelling images is important. Finding these can be a challenge. We recommend starting with a content strategy. Identify the content that you want to use first, then begin to think about what images help represent that. For the card marquee, this is easier. These images are standard high-quality profile/professional headshot images. If you have a person to feature but don’t have a high-quality photo, the college’s Marketing and Communications team may be able to help, either with their archive of photos or by arranging to take a high-quality photo of the person.
For the horizontal rotating marquee, this can be more challenging. We recommend avoiding images with text, as these create accessibility issues for your website. Instead, look for photos that feature people, engaging in activities. When in doubt, the George Mason University photo repository has plenty of options of stock photography featuring students, faculty and staff on campus that can be used on Mason website.
Recommended dimensions for marquee images can be found on our CHSSWeb Help page and the college’s Marketing and Communication team can consult with you on your content and images.
Photography
Photography is an important element in the George Mason brand. Active shots of students that show the surrounding George Mason environment are preferred. Use full-color photography, without filters or special effects.
The Office of University Branding's photo and video b-roll collection is available to the campus community at photo.gmu.edu.
Things to avoid when using photos:
- Do not use blurry or pixelated images
- Do not use images that are distorted, unclear, or under or over exposed (too dark or too washed out)
- Do not change the photo in such a way that it changes the meaning of the photograph
