Site Content

The following policy guidelines have been worked out in conjunction with the vestry to control the way that sensitive information is exposed through the site and managed on the server.

Names

The names of individual parishioners may be published in the pages of this site. They will not be "sanitized" but published in full. The one exception to this rule is that the names of minors will never be exposed on publicly-accessible pages.

Email Addresses

Where contact information is included it will only be exposed as email addresses. The addresses used will always be those mailboxes set up under the ststeph.com domain for the express purpose of those congregants needing to be contacted as part of parish business. Individuals' personal email addresses will not be used on publicly-accessible pages without prior consent.

Phone Numbers

The only personal phone numbers that will be published will be those that have been expressly cleared with the owners of said numbers. Without prior consent personal phone numbers will not be exposed on publicly-accessible pages. The only exception to this rule is institutional phone numbers such as the main church office and the numbers of other churches.

Schedules

Per the request of the vestry staff, vacation schedules will be expunged from the calendar to avoid exposing vacationing staff to the risk of being burgled.

Site Accessibility

Page format

Every page of this site is verified prior to publication to make sure that it conforms to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional specification. The reason we do this is not simply technical, but because this standard ensures that blind and low vision users can successfully use software assistance to access the site aurally. For more details on this whole subject you are recommended to visit the Web Accessibility Initiative site run by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Page Layout

We also use standard-based web design techniques, with the absolute minimum of Dynamic HTML (DHTML) to ensure that the content of the site reflects its purpose, and there is a minimum of extraneous markup-driven tags in each page. This ensure faster page loading, since the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are already cached and again makes it easier for vision-impaired users' assistance software to figure out the content of each page