Content managers may occasionally want to search for specific phrases within the content of their CMS website. To search your site for a specific phrase, follow these steps.
Redirects are important when webpage URLs change on your website. There are many reasons why this could happen:
- your site’s root folder name may need to change because your department is going through a name change
- you may change the name of a folder or subfolder
- you may move a page, folder, or file
- you may delete a page, folder, or file
When any of these actions occur, it is important that a proper redirect is put into place. This ensures that the old URL continues to work for any users who find it or have it saved.
The following tips are meant to help CMS users with day-to-day maintenance of basic content on their websites.
Paste as Text
If you paste content from a document or email into Omni CMS, you will likely get a bunch of bad code added behind the scenes that will effect how your webpage will look at function. To avoid issues, try clicking the “Paste as Text” button before pasting your content or use the Ctrl + Shift + V key combination.
The negative to pasting as text is that you will have to do some formatting manually (adding bold, adding links, etc). However, this will help to ensure that your website meets brand and accessibility standards and works correctly on all devices.
Headings
Headings play a key role in accessibility requirements and general page usability. It is important to use proper HTML headings instead of bold paragraphs or single lines of text and to not use the heading styling when the content is not a heading. To apply a heading style to a line of text, put your cursor inside of the line of text and then select a heading level from the paragraph dropdown menu in the Omni CMS editor. The same method working in other online applications, such as Google Docs. For text that you want to highlight that is not actually heading content, use the font styles in the Styles dropdown menu of the Omni CMS editor instead.
Alt tags (also known as Image Descriptions or alt text) are a very important for the accessibility of your webpage. Moz does a good job of explaining what alt tags are. Please take a moment to read up on what alt tags are and why they are important. Moz also provides some tips for how to write good ones.
There are many uses for alt tags. The most well-known ones are:
- Screen readers will speak the alt tag of an image for users who cannot see.
- If an image cannot be loaded due to some sort of network or IT error, the alt tag will display instead.
- Alt tags boost search engine rankings and can help your website’s images display in Google search results.
A free service called Google My Business lets small businesses update their search engine listing. This is particularly useful for Michigan Tech departments who focus on sales, who run promotions, who have distinct hours of operations, and/or which attract and serve tourists.
Customizable Content
Google My Business lets you customize various aspects of your business information in Google search results, including:
- Address
- Hours of Operation, including special hours for holidays
- Phone number(s)
- Photos of your business (inside and outside)
- Promotions/Sales
- Website
Michigan Tech faculty, staff, and students win numerous awards each year. UMC has been asked to recommend a template for promoting award winners on departmental and academic websites.
There has been some confusion over what our CMS does and does not back up as a part of its revision process, so the purpose of this blog post is to clarify things. This information is accurate for both Percussion Rhythmyx and Omni CMS.
Content Backups
Enterprise Content Management Systems store pieces of content. You have a Generic Page which stores the meat of your webpage’s content. However, there is more. Think of a sidebars and sliders (Highlights). Images. And navigation—made up of Navons. There are also Files. Maybe some Script items or Personnel Information items. All told, any given webpage is made up of 50-100 total individual items.
Any CMS does a good job of keeping track of revisions for these items. Each revision is basically a backup of that individual piece of content. As long as an item is not deleted (purged), we will have a history for that item. If the item is deleted, then its revision history is also deleted.
The University Events Calendar is for attendable events—not deadlines, dates to remember, private departmental retreats, etc. There are two ways to post events to our Events Calendar:
General Campus Community
- Use the gold “Submit an Event” button at the bottom of the calendar homepage.
Calendar Admins
- Login to the calendar using the link in the header.
- Once logged in, click the “Calendar Admin” shortcut in the header.
- Click the “Add an Event” button in the Events menu.
- Check the “Publish Immediately” box at the top of the form.
- Follow the steps below to fill out all of the event information.
Please note that calendar admins have access to additional fields that do not exist on the public event submission webpage and skip the approval queue.
If you are a calendar admin, please use the event submission form available through your Admin login, as specified above. If you do not have admin access, but often add events for your department, please request access by sending your name, user ID, and department(s) to webcal@mtu.edu.
Instructions for Event Information
The following is a step-by-step guide for filling out your event information. It is important to use the fields correctly as there is additional code set up to provide specific information to Google in order to display events in search results.
Our new Events Calendar has been a huge success so far, with over 43,000 views in the past month, representing an 85% increase in calendar use compared to last year. We have learned a few things along the way and want to explain a few changes that we have made, along with some best practices, and new features.
The Problem
Consider the following scenario:
- Career Services adds Career Fair to the calendar
- Many different departments want to put this event on their calendar as it is a very popular event
- Some departments use the Contact Us form to have the event properly added to their own department’s calendar
- Some departments duplicate the event onto their calendar
- We end up with 7 copies of the same event floating around in the system, causing user confusion
- The original event now appears to involve several departments instead of only the originator (in this case, Career Services)
Sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it? Luckily, we have made some adjustments and have developed some ‘best practices‘ to alleviate this common issue.