An official page is one that communicates official information about the services, requirements, or curriculum of the College, or one of its programs or offices, and is maintained for that purpose by an academic department or administrative office. Official pages are reviewed and approved by the Communications office before being linked from Bates Online and are subsequently monitored.

Currently, official Bates Web pages are in the process of being migrated from "abacus" (a set of static HTML pages) to "Ingeniux CMS", (an XML/XSLT-based content-management system). With Ingeniux CMS, users do not have to learn HTML to build pages. All the technical work occurs behind-the-scenes, and users merely have to fill in a series of text fields to enter information.

A non-official page is any page that does not fall under the definition of an official page. Examples of non-official pages are personal homepages and the pages of student organizations. Non- official pages are neither reviewed nor monitored.