On Tuesday, June 19th, people.ua.edu websites will migrate from the Weebly Designer Platform to Weebly Cloud giving a fresh, new look to the dashboard page and providing a single sign-on location for users who manage multiple sites. Users will not see any changes in the site editor or the live version of their sites.

Below is an example of the current dashboard and the new dashboard. Please note: The image of the new dashboard is from our test account which will look slightly different once we have fully migrated.

Migrating to Weebly Cloud should resolve the login issues we have recently encountered.

More changes will occur to the administration side of people.ua.edu. Weebly Cloud offers:

• the option of adding multiple contributors to one site
• the ability to recover deleted pages and text elements

During migration, users will be unable to log into the site editor starting 2:30pm on Tuesday, June 19th. The process should take no more than one hour.

There are more benefits and enhancements coming in the near future so be sure to watch for updates!

​The long awaited final three responsive themes are finally completed!

​These new themes offer some unique features not available on our other themes: sections, flexible headers, and video backgrounds.
 
Sections
Sections allow you to really customize your website! Adding sections takes just a few clicks:

• Drag and drop the new section element onto your site
• Choose a section layout or add your own elements individually
• Customize the section with image, text, color or video backgrounds

You can also create parallax scrolling and reveal effects directly from the sections editor. Predefined sections layouts help you create sites faster, providing professionally designed templates you can customize and build off of. These layouts include: gallery sections, team pages, menus, contact pages and much more. You can easily preview and remove layouts if you don’t like them.
 
Flexible Headers
Flexible headers give you the freedom to drag on new elements, tweak content positions and dynamically change the height of the header area simply by dragging it up and down. With this feature, you can now control your header like the rest of your site content. Instead of using an image, change the background color to give your text more “pop” or add a slideshow! These flexible headers really ARE flexible!
 
Video Backgrounds
Video backgrounds provide extra charisma to your pages and can be added to both sections and flexible headers when you customize backgrounds. You can access video backgrounds from Edit Background within the section element or during header customization. You can upload your own video or choose from a gallery of curated videos.

If you see something you like and want to change from your current template, let me know which one, and I'll be glad to apply it for you. All your content will carry over to the new design with one possible exception: the images used in the header, either as a single image or as a slideshow. These images may NOT carry over. They may need to be uploaded again. 

Visit the Themes page to view our new designs.

Can't wait to see what great things you do with these new themes!

​Karen

Congratulations to our latest exemplar websites!!
​

• Dr. Jon Benstead, Biological Sciences department, uses his site to not only present his work, but to present the work of his research students and to recruit new students!
• Dr. Mithat C. Kisacikoglu in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Kisacikoglu made great use of visuals to help draw attention to his site content! His site is clean, crisp, and informative.
• Rong Zheng is a PhD candidate in the Culverhouse College of Business Applied Statistics Program. Rong’s site is straight-forward and organized so she can easily add more content as her work develops.

 
All three did a great job! Visit the Showcase page to view the new sites.

We have several more great sites to showcase and hope to begin updating the page on a monthly basis.
​Will your site be next?!

Recently, our web provider, Weebly, updated its image editor. While it is a GOOD thing for the average image, it is not such a good thing when it comes to uploading a logo and adding text to the site title. Unless you want to make a change to your site title, this update will not adversely affect you. 
 
The new editor recognizes the current site logo and title as a single image. As an image, the text cannot be edited. No worries, though, it simply means we had to make a change to the logo itself allowing empty space for new text to be added. Just HOW we fixed it isn't really that important. What is important is that you know how to update your site!

For those who want to edit the site title, follow the instructions on our Site Title and Logo page or feel free to contact our office and we’ll be happy to make the change for you.

​Karen

If you find that your site is looking a little bland or have ever wanted to add some color to your page, you're in luck! We've added a short tutorial covering all the steps you'll need to add a colored text box to your site through the use of the Embed Code Element. Check it out here!

Harrison

As we move into Fall, it is time once again to pick our new Showcase sites! Congratulations to:

• Astronautics Laboratory - by John Baker. This site showcases one of our new responsive themes, Aroma!
• Dr. Matthias Kaminski - Department of Physics. This site makes great use of custom headers and is a great example  of Clean Lines, another of our new responsive themes! It also makes great us
• Ali Dogru - P.H.D Candidate in the Manderson Graduate School of Alabama. This site has a very clean appearance and shows the advantages graduate students can have by taking advantage of our site builder!

Let us know your thought in the comments below and browse through our other sites on the Showcase page!

​Harrison

Have you heard the news? The responsive themes are here!  And we think you’re going to love them!
 
So what’s the difference in these new themes and the ones we currently offer? Aside from a new, sleek, modern look, these themes were constructed with “responsive design”, enabling your website to automatically respond to any device and optimize the user experience. As stated by Weebly (2015), “Responsive websites are built on grids that can collapse, expand, and stack based on the environment they’re responding to. They do this with CSS media queries, flexible layouts, and design elements that can resize and scale on the fly. The result is a single website that can change instantly whether it’s being viewed on a desktop monitor, retina-ready iPad screen, or Android device.”  Each theme meets The University of Alabama web design standards.

• While not exact, Aroma was designed to closely resemble UA’s new website. It uses the same crimson/gray color scheme, font style, size, and color.  Aroma offers six page layouts with the search bar, social media icons, and phone number at the very top of the site.
• Clean Lines is reflective of its name; clean. It utilizes a simple white background in the header and body area with a soft gray footer area. Clean Lines offers five page layouts with the search bar, social media icons, and phone number residing in the footer area, which is a relatively new trend in modern website design. The font styles, colors and sizes have been designed for easy readability.
• Bold is the word that best describes Brisk. With six page layouts, san-serif fonts, and a light gray overlay to all header images, this theme is sure to grab the attention of your site visitors. The Splash page layout provides a unique, full-page background that adds an extra “pop” to images and text.

Take a look at the designs on our Themes page and send us an email (people@ua.edu) if you want to give one a try.

It's finally Summer and we kick it off with three new websites in our Showcase! Congratulations to:

• Thompson Research Group - by Dr. Greg Thompson, Metallurgical & Materials Engineering
• Evolutionary Genetics - by Dr. Janna Fierst, Biological Sciences
• Alyssa Miller - PhD student, Spanish and Applied Linguistics

Enjoy browsing through these great websites on the Showcase page and let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment! We would love to hear from you.

​Karen

It's that time again... We've chosen three recently published sites to showcase this time around. Here's the lucky trio - and what rocks about their online presence.

• Dr. Hilary Green (Gender and Race Studies) makes great use of images, particularly as page headers.
• The Developmental Ecology and Human Biology Lab's site has a clean, bright look that we absolutely love.
• The Applied Computational Engineering (ACE) Lab pulls you right in with an awesome animation on the homepage.

Kudos to Drs. Green, DeCaro, and MacPhee - you've done great work!

One of the easiest ways to dress up your website is by adding some photos. You could use stock photos or have some professional shots taken, but why not make use of the camera you carry with you everywhere? By learning how to take high-quality pictures with your phone camera, you'll be ready at a moment's notice to capture exciting discoveries in the lab or to showcase your students' work.

Learn how to prepare your camera, set up a shot, and adjust photos to look their best in our new training guide, Taking Fabulous Cell Phone Photos. The guide is also available to download as a PDF.