All Updates

Optimizing Images

Why it’s useful: Optimizing images for the web improves download times for clients and saves server space. UMaine requires all images to be 1M or less before uploading to the CMS. What you’ll need: Preview (free program for the Mac) Instructions: File/Open an image Duplicate the image (work on the copy to keep the original […]

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Best practices for UMaine web managers

Following a few best practices will help make your web pages polished and professional. Proofread your pages or ask someone else to proofread them, since it’s often hard to spot your own mistakes. Typos and grammatical errors erode our credibility as an educational institution. It’s pretty embarrassing that the most commonly misspelled word on our […]

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Website tool — Monsido

The University of Maine System has provided a website tool to aid in the important task of managing the quality and accessibility of web content. Monsido has been scanning UMaine websites, and interactive reports are now available: Quality Control: Identify broken links Search Optimization: Find duplicate page titles Web Accessibility: List images that need alt […]

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Feedback needed: Social sharing buttons and “Jetpack”

When the current generation of UMaine websites launched in 2015, we chose to adopt a set of features (a “plugin” in WordPress terms) that included social sharing buttons for posts. As an administrator for your site, you may have noticed a link in your dashboard for “Jetpack” that includes many features that can be enabled for a […]

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Best Practices: Accessibility and videos

Web accessibility has always been a requirement for UMaine websites, and Digital Communications will be increasing our efforts to improve the accessibility of web content on umaine.edu in the coming year. The term “accessibility” refers to our efforts to remove barriers that prevent access to websites by people who have a disability. This month, we focus on […]

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Screenshot detail of WordPress dashboard showing UMaine Maps

New feature: UMaine Maps

Our most recent new feature: maps for your websites. If you need to depict points of interest on campus, across the state, or around the globe, our new map feature is worth exploring: Create individual map points for any address or map coordinates Categorize map points to display several points of interest together in a […]

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Known issues with UMaine’s WordPress system

The UMaine website design— ‘theme’ in WordPress terms— is complex, and there are known issues you may encounter: Scheduling feature does not work There is a built-in feature in WordPress where you can create a post or page, and schedule it to publish at a date/time in the future. The feature utilizes a scheduled task […]

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Best practices: Alt text for images

Web accessibility has always been a requirement for UMaine websites, and Digital Communications will be increasing our efforts to improve the accessibility of web content on umaine.edu in the coming year. The term “accessibility” refers to our efforts to remove barriers that prevent access to websites by people who have a disability. This month, we […]

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Updating published email addresses

As you may know, UMaine retired the FirstClass system in May of this year. This means that every email address that ended with @umit.maine.edu will eventually stop working. Please take a look at your website for published email addresses that may need to be updated. You can use the website search feature to help— navigate […]

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Menu Content Block highlighted

Menu content block

Last semester we debuted a new content block for menus. This will allow you to add links to a web page in one of several menu formats: Bulleted list of links Vertical menu, similar to the sidebar menus Button bar menu, similar to the “call to action” widget If you have used the custom menu […]

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