Webmaster's Blog

Category: Best Practices

Common Errors on Webpages

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There are many common issues you can watch for on your webpages to help increase the quality and search engine optimization (SEO) of your pages, make them more accessible, and follow Michigan Tech’s editorial standards.

Specific instructions that may be included below are for Michigan Tech’s Modern Campus CMS.

Misspellings

It only takes a few misspellings to affect a user’s impression of your website. Be sure to use the spell-checking options within Modern Campus CMS before publishing your pages. The system does not check spelling as you go. Within the editor, you can use the Spell Check icon Spell Check icon to check the existing text and underline spelling errors. Before publishing you should always run the Final Checks, which includes a spelling check.

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Page or Site Redirects

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Redirects are important when webpage URLs change on your website. There are many reasons why this could happen:

  1. your site’s root folder name may need to change because your department is going through a name change
  2. you may change the name of a folder or subfolder
  3. you may move a page, folder, or file
  4. 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.

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Recommended Formatting of Hours

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There are many instances when you need to display hours on your webpage—hours of operation, advisor walk-in hours, and learning center times to name a few. The following formatting recommendations and tips for displaying basic hours will make them easy to see and understand by both sighted users and anyone using a screen reader. Additional formatting information can be found in the University Editorial Guide.

Sidebar with Hours title and example hours.
Basic hours of operation differentiate by time of year.

Sidebar with Make an Appointment title and text and hours in the content.
Basic hours with additional text.

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Creating Headings

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It is important to use properly structured HTML headings when organizing your web content. Think of webpage headings as a table of contents for a story.

Headings are not required on webpages. However, they help break up and organize lengthy informational webpages—improving readability. Proper heading use is not only important for accessibility, it also has search engine optimization benefits, which can help your webpages rank higher in Google’s search results.

According to the University’s editorial guide, headings are always title case, meaning you should capitalize all words that are not articles, prepositions, or to-be verbs. Do not use a colon (:) at the end of a heading.

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Proper Content and Page Structure

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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 Modern Campus 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.

Paste as Text icon in the toolbar.

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 Modern Campus 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 Modern Campus CMS editor instead.

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How to copy/paste clean code

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Have you ever pasted content into the CMS, and it just doesn’t look right? You’re probably carrying old formatting code into the new CMS. Common culprits are copying from a Word document, copying text from one browser and pasting it into another, or copying text that was formatted in-line (using <span> and <style> tags directly in the code instead of letting the preformatted stylesheets do the work.)

Adding content with this type of formatting is bad for a couple of reasons:

  • It doesn’t let your page update with the rest of the CMS. We may decide to change the font size or style to make the site more accessible or to keep up with modern design trends. By using the standard heading (<h1>, <h2>, etc) and paragraph (<p>) tags, your content will be ready to shift in an instant. If you leave hard-coded styles in the page, your look won’t automatically change.
  • It can look strange on different devices. Everything on our new template is designed to expand and contract with the user’s screen size. Hard-coded styles may not change in the right way between desktop and mobile.
  • It’s annoying for you, the CMS user. Sometimes you’ll have lines and lines of needless code – annoying when you’re trying to find one or two words in pages of <span>s and <color>s. For example, look at the coding on the links below—the <u> and <span> tags make for messy code on the back and and ugly links on the front end.

Screen Shot 2017-06-30 at 2.38.47 PMScreen Shot 2017-06-30 at 2.40.52 PM

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Website and Content Backups

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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.

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.

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