How you add your ICRA label to your website depends on how you construct your site as a whole. Therefore for the most appropriate advice, please select the option that best suits you from the list below:
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I am a professional/competent webmaster and am familiar with a variety of web-building techniques. |
| Please click here | |
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I use a web design tool that allows me to access the HTML source code directly if I need to. |
| Microsoft Front Page users click here Dreamweaver MX users click here Otherwise click here |
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I have some experience but labelling is not something I’ve done before. |
| OK, start with the basics. There’s plenty of help in the other FAQs if you need it. | |
| Please click here | |
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Just give me the basics and I’ll take it from there. |
| Please click here | |
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None of the above options sound like me, walk me through it step by step and spare me the explanations please! |
| Windows users please click here Mac users please click here |
Using a web design tool
Web design tools are there to make it easy to create a website. Most of the time you don’t need to worry about the code behind the page you’re creating. However, adding an ICRA label does involve copying and pasting your label directly into the source code.
If your web design tool allows you to add something to every page of your site automatically, please use it – ideally labels should be included on every page and it’s a lot easier if the machine does the hard work for you!
However you access it in your web design tool, get to the source code of your site. Then follow the basic instructions below.
Basic instructions
The simplest and most common aim is to label your whole site with the same label. In this case, your label will look similar to this:
This label declares that everything on the (fictitious) site at www.example.org has “none of the above” in all sections of the ICRA questionnaire. Your own label will, of course, quote your domain name and encode whatever rating is appropriate for your site. Please note: when creating a label for a whole site like this, the URL should just be the domain name of the site. The label generator will strip out strings such as /index.htm and trailing slashes at the end of your URL when you apply for a gen true label.
Copy and paste your label into the head section of all the pages on your website. That is, between the and tags in the source code. If you use a template for your pages then this should be easy.
That’s it – your site is labelled!
Next steps:
If you so choose, you can add a text link that declares that you have labelled with ICRA. Many sites have some sort of “small print” links at the bottom of the home page, perhaps to a privacy statement. You could add a “Labelled with ICRA” text link in similar fashion. Please link to http://www.icra.org/labelv02.html. NB: that’s zero two, not oh two.
Words like “approved by ICRA” or “rated by ICRA” are expressly forbidden. The Internet Content Rating Association does NOT approve or disapprove of any site, neither do we rate sites. We provide a platform for webmasters to label their own sites according to our rating system.
As an alternative, you can add an ICRA logo to your site. A variety of buttons has been produced to take account of the enormous diversity of web sites and the fact that in the US, “Labelled” is spelt with a single “l”. Click the link below then choose the logo that best suits your site. To save an image to your hard drive using Windows, right click on the chosen image, Mac users should hold down the Ctrl key and click as normal. Either way, you should then select “Save Picture As…” and save the image in the same location as the other images on your site.
You can then incorporate the ICRA logo into your site as you would any other graphic. Again, please link to http://www.icra.org/labelv02.html.
To see the available ICRA logos, please click here.
Related topics:
FAQ 1.2 Do I really have to add the label into every page?
Almost certainly yes. In order for a filter to recognise a resource as being labelled, whether it be a page or an element within a page such as an image or external script file, one of two things must be true:
- The resource carries a label for itself
- The filter already has a label in its cache memory that can be applied to the unlabelled resource.
The second condition can only be achieved by using a “gen true” label. This is explained in FAQ 1.3.
Filtering software should not look anywhere else. There is no “default location” for labels. Therefore, if a visitor to your site lands on a page without a label, it will be unable to classify it.
If you use a template for your pages, make sure you include the label in it!
Related topics:
FAQ 1.3 How can I control what a label covers?
By default, a label applies to the file (the page) that carries it. If a web page contained the label below in the header section of its HTML then that page alone would be labelled.
However, you usually want to include the images and other elements embedded within the page. This label won’t do that. It’s attached to the file that carries it and no other. So, you need to tell the filter “hang on to this label and apply it to some stuff that’s coming behind me.” This is achieved through the generic (gen) flag thus:
This label will be cached (held in memory) by the filter and applied to other resources that come from the example.org site. More technically, if the URI begins with the string quoted in the ‘for’ statement, the label can be applied.
Note that it is only a string and has no particular meaning. URIs at http://subdomain.example.org are NOT covered.
It is also possible to set the generic flag to false thus:
This label explicitly declares that it is to be applied only to page.htm on the example.org website.
Any label carrying a gen true flag should be cached by a filter for the online session. Filters should not hold labels in long term memory. How multiple labels for a given site are handled and prioritized is discussed in FAQ 1.4
Related topics:
FAQ 1.4 How do I label different sections and individual pages?
You may have any number of labels on a website. The section or page to which each label applies is specified in its ‘for’ statement. Thus you might have labels that look like this:
The label states that the specific page (message_board.html) has none of the elements in the ICRA questionnaire but it does contain moderated chat that is suitable for children and teens. It will not be cached so it can only appear on the page to which it relates. However, it will be given priority over any gen true labels already held in cache.
It is possible to omit all the gen true|false for “URL” elements. In this case the rating will be applied to the resource carrying it, whatever its URL. This is useful for portable documents and where labels are delivered automatically with all files through server configuration. See the professional website labelling advice for more details.
NB. Internet Explorer’s Content Advisor does not adhere to the PICS standard on this point and generally applies labels with no generic flag to any URL it comes across!
Should every label go on every page?
No. Label(s) need only be included on the page or pages to which they apply. However, no harm is done by labels appearing on pages to which they do not apply.
Related topics:
FAQ 1.5 How do I label a site that uses frames?
If your site uses frames, the simplest way to proceed is to put a label that covers the whole site in the page that defines the frameset. Your code might look something like this:
Website title
Since the frameset is always loaded before the pages that go into it, the site is fully labelled and you won’t need to label the individual pages.
If you label the pages, but don’t label the frameset, the site will always show as unlabelled because the first file loaded has no label.
Related topics:
FAQ 1.6 How do I label elements pulled from other websites such as banner ads?
It is possible to include labels for resources pulled from other domains but you will need to specify which other domains should be covered. For example, if a page at www.example.org includes an image pulled in from www.example_2.org, the label would look like this: