As part of the overall website redesign project, we are refining the presentation and enhancing the editing options available on WordPress faculty profile pages. These changes came about as a result of feedback from faculty, consultation with the Dean of the Faculty’s office, and upgrades to our content management system.
A list of improvements is below, but the gist is that editing your profile page will be easier after the redesign launch, you’ll have more formatting options for text and photos, and you’ll have more control over some automatically (PeopleSoft) supplied information (such as whether to show the year you earned your graduate degree).
We’ll continue refining these profiles to make them easier to maintain and more useful for the web visitor. We have received some feature requests we have not been able to implement yet because they require more functionality between the website and the college’s enterprise systems (namely PeopleSoft). Better integration of these two systems is an ongoing process that will give us greater flexibility and more options in the future.
You can preview the examples of the updated profiles here, and once you’ve done so, please share your thoughts about them by completing our web feedback form:
- Simple profile: http://history.stage.williams.edu/profile/glong/
- Customized profile: http://history.stage.williams.edu/profile/cwaters/
Faculty Profiles 101
A short primer for those who have yet to explore the profile pages. The profiles are meant to provide a quick, easy way for departments to provide information about their faculty and for faculty to highlight their work, as well as to provide a consistent experience for the web visitor interested in learning about our faculty. By simply turning on the profile functionality (available to all sites in WordPress), a profile page is created for each faculty member, and basic information is displayed automatically. If you want to add more information, a variety of optional content areas are available (Areas of Expertise, Scholarship and Creative Work, etc), and you can create your own custom text and add images of your choosing. Adding and changing content is done in an editing system that looks and acts much like Microsoft Word.
It’s important to note that these profiles are not meant to replace the personal web pages of faculty who maintain their own web presence. All faculty may add a link to their own page and this link will be displayed near the top of their profile.
Basic information displayed on all profile pages:
- Name & title
- Contact information (phone, email, office address)
- Higher education degrees
- Courses taught
- Current committee membership
- Directory photo
New features available after the redesign launch:
- Larger profile photos allowed (no longer confined to thumbnail size)
- Optional display of graduation years
- Improved content editor offers:
- picture upload into media library for content sections
- simplified process for linking to pages on department site
- full-screen mode
- additional formatting options including block quotes
- Page preview button in edit mode
- The ability to save private/draft versions
