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.
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Logged into the site editor lately? If you have, you have noticed a sleeker, new update to the icons and dialog boxes. All the same options are still available, they just look a little different.
If you haven't yet published your site, now is a great time to finish it up! Aside from our regular workshops, we offer open lab sessions where I'll be around to offer assistance as you work on your website. The schedule is on our Open Lab page. Enjoy the improvements! Karen Here's a post directly from Weebly providing great tips for building forms on your site.
http://www.weebly.com/blog/how-to-make-a-great-form Weebly has released an exciting new feature called Page Layouts for all our People.ua.edu websites! With Page Layouts you can choose a predefined layout design that automatically populates blank pages with real site elements. You can then edit, delete or add new elements to build the perfect page. These customizable page frameworks provide both guidance and design inspiration, saving you time and making it easier than ever to create the right page for your website. There are over 30 different Page Layout designs to choose from, including Home, About, Contact, Portfolio, and more. You can first access Page Layouts when starting a new page or site, but it won’t prevent you from building your own page layout as you would today. If you don’t want to use our Page Layouts feature, you can simply drag a new element onto a blank page manually. We think that Page Layouts is going to be a valuable tool, giving you additional creative options, and allowing you to build a great-looking website even faster! Please see the FAQs below for additional information. As always, I'm here to assist you if you have any questions. Karen FAQ:
How can I change my page layout once I’ve already selected one? You can change your page layout by removing the existing elements on the page. Once they are removed, the option to choose a new page layout will appear on your page. Will I be able to create or modify Page Layouts? If you delete all existing elements, you will be able to choose a new layout. Modifying existing layouts works exactly as it would today for existing layouts that you’ve manually created. Can I still add my own elements without having to use a Page Layout? Yes. Page Layouts offer a quick and easy solution to building out a blank page, but you can always add your own elements. We have three new sites highlighted on our Showcase page today! Congratulations to:
Mohammad’s is the first graduate student website we have showcased! We’ve had many graduate students start working on their professional websites, but only a few have actually published theirs. I encourage faculty to help your graduate students understand the importance of an online presence and help them develop their sites. We love to show off great websites! Will yours be next? Visit the Showcase! I had the wonderful opportunity of presenting People.ua.edu to the Nursing Faculty Organization meeting on March 9th. There were approximately 40 members and guests in the room, as well as a few members joining online. This short, 10 minute presentation, included a user statistics and a visit to a two sample sites. In the final few minutes, I opened a blank website and demonstrated just how easy it is to drag and drop various elements onto the page. No coding skills required! Many thanks to the entire group for the invitation!
I am proud that UA administration provides People.ua.edu as a service for its faculty and graduate students. It’s a fantastic way of displaying their professional background, expertise and activities. Currently, there are over 160 live People.ua.edu websites with the majority coming from the Department of Psychology, the College of Human and Environmental Sciences, and the College of Education. Karen Silliman, Director of Technology and Distance Education in the College of Nursing has kindly agreed to provide a client opinion if you have questions about our quality of service or People.ua.edu’s ease of use. Do you have a People.ua.edu website? If not, request one today! I look forward to helping you create a great website! Karen Weebly has recently added a useful new feature to its websites: membership. You now have the option to require visitors to log in to access certain areas of your site.
You can turn on this feature by going to the Settings tab for your site and then clicking on Members. Checking the “Show 'Log In' in site menu” box will add a Log In link to your main navigation. When users click this link, they will be able to log in to access members-only content. Adding members is very simple. Just go to the Settings tab and click on Members, and locate the button that says "Add Member." Provide the name and email address of the person you would like to add, and set which pages they can access/which groups they are in (see below). Then click the green "Add Member" button at the bottom to complete the process. (You can also add members via CSV file; click the "Add from CSV" button to learn more.) Additionally, you can give different members access to different pages by utilizing Member Groups. For example, if you teach more than one class, you can give student members access only to the pages relevant to the class they are in. Simply create a group for that class, and add the students to it in the Settings > Members tab. Control of who can see a page is managed through the Pages tab. Click on the page you want to manage, and look for the Visibility drop-down menu. Select “Specific Members or Groups” and then choose which members or groups should be able to see this page. We hope you will find this new addition useful. As always, if you have any questions, we are here to help – just give us a shout at kaburns1@ua.edu or 205-348-8016. Weebly has made some big changes with the blog features. The biggest change is the ability to schedule a post in advance! Read all about it on theirblog! Here's the "How'd they do that" video by Weebly to get you started. You can create a link that directs users to a specific place (or anchor) on a page of your site. For example, if you are writing a blog post about Twitter feeds, you may want to link to your social media page; instead of having visitors scroll all the way down to the section in question, you can link to an "already scrolled" page!
Creating these special links is very easy. Open the editor and navigate to the page you want to link to. Then, just above the section you wish to link to, add the element called "Embed Code." In this element, type the following: <div id="Twitter Feed"></div> (You should replace the words Twitter Feed with a title appropriate to the section you're naming.) Next, publish the site and navigate to the page you want to link to. Copy the URL (such as http://kaburns1.people.ua.edu/social-media.html). Then go back to the editor and highlight the text you want to use as your link. Click the chain link in the toolbar, and choose the URL option. Paste the URL that you just copied, and add the following to the end of it: #Twitter Feed (Use the tag you created before in the Embed Code element. Spaces are okay!) The URL should now look something like this: http://kaburns1.people.ua.edu/social-media.html#Twitter Feed. Publish the changes, then visit your site to make sure everything works! DivTag templates has a great video tutorial about these special links on their site. Good luck! People.ua.edu has recently been made available to graduate students, and if you are one of them, you may be asking yourself some questions: What is a graduate student website? Why do I need one? What should I put on it? The first two questions are answered in a previous post: Welcome Graduate Students! But even after you've been convinced of the utility of a personal academic website, you're probably still unsure what should go on it. We are here to help!
Your personal academic website is your online identity. And you get to choose what it looks like! A good rule of thumb for design is to keep things simple (a nice neutral color palette works best) and consistent (i.e. don't use different colored text for each page). Avoid long walls of text in which the reader can get lost; pictures or block quotes are a great way to break up paragraphs. Above all, keep the design professional-looking and non-cluttered. Professionalism must apply to your content as well. Potential employers as well as your teachers and students will be looking at your site on a regular basis. You want it to make a good impression! A link to your Twitter feed or blog is admissible only if the contents is appropriate for a professional environment. Now that you know how to make your site look good and what not to put on it, let's talk about what you should put on it. Most important is keeping your personal academic website up-to-date; as this great Chronicle article puts it, "Nothing says apathy like a website that hasn't been updated since 2004." Any time you do something new, add it to your site. Content you might post includes but is certainly not limited to:
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