In the past year, loyno.edu has received more than 11.5 million hits, with the average visitor browsing the site for almost 19 minutes at a time. Take away all the local traffic (people visiting the site while on campus), and loyno.edu received attention from 777,000 different people around the world in the past 12 months, each of them spending an average of 21 minutes on the site.

I emphasize those visitors not on campus (think prospective students from out-of-state and abroad) because for many of them loyno.edu is their first and only impression of Loyola University New Orleans. Our primary goal here in the Office of Web Communications is to make that impression as good and as memorable as it can possibly be. After all, if someone in that demographic is dissatisfied with the university’s web presence they are unlikely to form a positive opinion of Loyola as a whole.

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You’ve surely heard of Twitter by now. It’s the microblogging service that has hooked everyone from actors to sports stars to Iranians. The concept of Twitter is simple, but its multitude of uses may make it seem confusing. Here we present an introduction to Twitter to help you get started.

What is Twitter?

Twitter describes itself like so:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

That definition has become a little simplistic as Twitter has evolved and its audience expanded. I would liken Twitter to text messaging (SMS), except each message is broadcast to the world (a very important distinction, as noted by David Zemmels). Other users can “follow” you to make sure they receive those messages.

You can post and read messages on Twitter via your computer or cell phone. Even non-smart phones can receive SMS updates.

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SlideShowPro Director allows you to manage photos for a slideshow the Web Team has set up for you. You will have received a username and password so you can access ssp.loyno.edu. When you first log in to SSP Director, you can change your password by clicking your e-mail address at the top right of the page.

When you are logged in and ready to manage your slideshow, follow these steps:

Step 1: Find your album

Click the Albums tab at the top of the page, then find your album in the list. If the list is quite long, use the search box at the top to locate your album. Once you’ve found it, click the title.

You should now be on a page that looks like this:

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Mass Comments is the blog of Loyola’s School of Mass Communication, featuring the writings of selected faculty. Below are some instructions for submitting and editing posts on Mass Comments. If you have any additional questions, please contact the Web Team via webteam@loyno.edu.

Log In

Permitted bloggers can log in with their user name and password at the following URL:
http://blogs.loyno.edu/mass-comm/wp-admin/

Once logged in, you will see your dashboard. This gives you a quick summary of your activity on Mass Comments.

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Earlier this week I, along with Loyola’s Director of Web Communications Jacee Brown, gave a presentation to David Zemmels’ Web Design class in the School of Mass Communications. The title of the presentation was Building the new loyno.edu, and it focused on the planning, design and build of the new Loyola website, the homepage in particular.

The presentation can be viewed in QuickTime format online here. Click on each slide to advance. Be advised that it will probably take several minutes to load fully. If you wish to download the presentation, you can do so via this link. Just right click and choose save target as (PC) or save link as (Mac).

Some changes have been made to the banner styling on loyno.edu. There are now three different ways to style a banner. See below for an explanation of each.

Default banner

For the default banner to appear, banner.css must be called from the head of the page, and the HTML constructed like so:

<div id="banner">
<h1><a href="/" title="Click here to return to the homepage">Loyola University New Orleans</a></h1>
</div>

Note: If an anchor is present within the h1 (as in the above code sample), the “Loyola University New Orleans” text in the banner becomes clickable.

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This post will show you how to style text and images on loyno.edu using Drupal. Note that this only applies to text and images which you can change via Drupal’s rich text editor, as shown below:

Styling text

Beyond the basic functions (e.g. bolding and italicizing), you can also style text in the following ways:

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This post will show you how to create and style tables on loyno.edu using Drupal.

Create a table

Click the Insert/Edit Table button on the toolbar, as shown in the screenshot above (1). Doing so pops open the Table Properties window. In here you can toggle a few settings for your table. The only ones you need be concerned with are Rows/Columns (2) and Width (3). The other settings will not take effect no matter what you choose.

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Forms on loyno.edu must be constructed in a certain way so appropriate styling is applied. There are a number of CSS classes which can be used to achieve a desired form layout. This blog post will explain these classes and show examples of use.

Sample forms

To see a variety of sample forms, visit our demo page.

Basic requirements

1. The majority of styling applied to these forms is contained in the file forms-v2.css (uncompressed version: forms-v2.src.css), so that file must be called in the head of the HTML page. There are also some minor dependencies on other stylesheets, such as reset.css.
2. Each form tag must be given a class of default.

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Drupal is a web-based content management system used to create, edit, manage, search and publish various kinds of digital media and electronic text. The University Web Team chose to use Drupal to manage content for re-designed websites because it allows content editors to make website updates regardless of where you are or what computer you are using.

The University Web Team would like all content editors across Loyola’s campus to begin practicing Drupal using a development site called playground.loyno.edu. Please use the Drupal training presentation handout (download PDF) as your guide.

If you RSVP’d to the Drupal Training session, you have a username and password already setup for you on playground.loyno.edu. The username is the first part of your email address and the password is “letmein” (e.g. webteam@loyno.edu, username: webteam, password: letmein).

If you need a user profile created, please contact Jennifer Schlotbom at jschlotb@loyno.edu and a login will be created for you. General questions about your website should be directed to webteam@loyno.edu.

As we discussed in the training session, the University Web Team is beginning work on the conversion of all college websites and aims to have those complete by June 2009. We will be working with centers and institutes to convert their websites during the same time period. The Web Team will contact you when we are ready to begin work on your site.

We hope to address all division websites in the latter part of 2009. The Web Team’s goal is to complete the switch to Drupal by December 2009. With your help, we can do it.

To help us prepare for this large undertaking, we urge you to practice the skills you learned at today’s training session in our development website. We also urge you to review the content on your current website and delete or revise any content that is not needed or needs updating. Please also make sure that you have the photos that you need of your division, college, department, school, center, or institute that you may want to use on your new website. If you need professional photos taken at events or general facility or classroom photos, please contact the university photographer through his assistant, James Shields, at jshields@loyno.edu.

With your help, we can achieve success.

Good luck and happy editing!