Welcome New Faculty!

If you are new to the college, new to editing content in the WordPress content management system (CMS), or both: Welcome! We’d like to introduce you to a few of Williams’ more important web resources and to this site, which is home to Williams’ WordPress documentation.

Department Sites

The majority of departmental sites at Williams — academic and administrative — are powered by the WordPress CMS. WordPress’s ease of use allows departments to manage their own content, including news, events, and information about their academic or other programs. At the same time, some information is drawn from a central database to reduce redundant data entry and maintenance. Course lists and faculty/staff directory listings are the primary examples of centralized data.

Access to your department’s site is controlled by the department administrative assistant (or a designated member of the faculty), who is typically the CMS administrator and is the best point of contact for learning more about how your department manages its site. They can add you as a user with permission to edit content such as your personal profile.

Faculty Profile Pages

For most new faculty, getting their public profile page set up is among the first orders of business. The good news is that a default profile page displaying contact information, basic biographical data, and a directory photo is created automatically. The better news is that the profile page is flexible and capable of containing more detailed information about your work and areas of expertise, including links to published papers and personal websites. Expand the box below or visit the profile documentation page to learn more.

  • Sample Uncustomized Profile
    Sample Uncustomized Profile

    When you visit a department’s faculty/staff listing, you can click on a person’s name to go to their profile and find out more about them. Profiles are single page summaries that combine information from:

    If your department’s website is in WordPress, you already have a profile, and you can add content to it through WordPress. Profiles are not intended to be comprehensive – if you’d like to provide more extensive information about your teaching/research, you can create a separate website and link to it from your profile.

    Automatic profile information

    Everyone starts out with the following information, which automatically updates on profiles:

    • 105 x 135 photo (if available from the directory)
    • Name
    • Title
    • Contact information (phone, email, office location)
    • Higher education degrees
    • Courses taught this academic year (does not include winter study)
    • Current Williams faculty committee memberships

    The image to the left shows what an uncustomized profile, with just the automatically provided information, might look like.

    This information comes from the PeopleSoft database, and cannot be edited through WordPress. Updating PeopleSoft information

    Customizing your profile

    You can add and edit content, beyond the automatically provided information, through WordPress. You will need an account on your department’s website before you begin. If you have an account, you should be able to log into the site. If you can’t log in, contact your department’s administrative assistant or the web team to set up an account for you.

    profile-howdy-linkAfter logging in, look in the upper right corner of the dashboard for a link that says “Howdy, [your name]“. Mouse over this link to reveal a menu (shown right). Click on the “Edit Williams Profile” link. If there’s no “Edit Williams Profile” link, you will need to create a profile first.

    Viewing your profile

    view-profile-buttonFrom the profile editing screen, you can see what your current profile looks like by clicking the green “View Williams Profile” button (shown left). Make sure to save your changes first!

    If you’ve never saved or published your profile before, the green button will read “View Default Profile”. Clicking it will show you the uncustomized version of the profile, with only the values drawn from the PeopleSoft database.

    Profile fields

    Below is what a customized faculty profile might look like to website visitors. Each element is marked by how it can be edited:

    • Items editable via WordPress have a red number in a black box next to them.
      Look for the corresponding numbers below the screenshot for more details.
    • Items that can only be edited via PeopleSoft have a database icon next to them: database_refresh_16 How to update PeopleSoft information

     

    moriarty-customized1. Name

    Your full name, as you want it to appear as the title of your profile page. If this is not provided, the information will be filled in by PeopleSoft.

    2. Photo

    By default, your photo from the Williams People Directory will be displayed. If you prefer, you can upload a different picture just for your profile page via WordPress. If you’d like to update your directory photo as well (the one that appears on your department faculty list, and the main college directory), refer to the directory updates documentation.

    • edit-profile-picTo upload a custom photo for your profile, look for the "Profile Image" box located on the right side of the profile editing screen (shown right), and click on the "Upload custom profile image" link (outlined in red). This will launch the media popup window, which allows you to upload a new file, or select an existing one from the media library. Please note: To be valid, uploaded images must have either a .jpg or .png file extension.

      The bottom half of the image to the right shows what your screen might look like if you've already uploaded a custom profile image. If you decide you want to use a different photo, click on the "Remove profile image" link located below the photo, then click the "Upload custom profile image" link that reappears to start again.

      Unlike the main directory photos, the profile photos do not need to be a specific size, or be just a head/shoulders shot. Feel free to choose something less formal, and let your personality/interests show.

    3. Website

    Optional. Enter the full URL (starting with http://) of your website in the “External Website URL” text box.

    4. CV

    Optional. Upload your Curriculum Vitae (in PDF format). If you need upload an updated version of the PDF, you should delete the old version from WordPress’ media library first (here’s why).

    5. At Williams Since

    Optional. Enter the 4-digit year you started working at Williams.

    6. Additional Contact Information

    Optional. Add office hours, a lab phone, or anything else a student might need to know to get a hold of you.

    7-10. Various experience & expertise fields

    All of these fields are optional, and start off blank. The headers for these sections will only appear if you fill them out.

    • Areas of Expertise
    • Scholarship & Creative Work
    • Awards, Fellowships & Grants
    • Professional Affiliations

    11. Other Information

    If fields 6-9 don’t cover all of your needs, or if you’d rather have a condensed “Biography” section instead of using the other fields, you can use the “Other Information” section. This section doesn’t come with a header- you will need to add one yourself (see editor toolbar, below).

    Additional settings

    Page Redirect

    Instead of showing this profile, website visitors will be redirected to a different site- your personal website. Enter your site’s full URL, starting with http://.

    Williams User Name

    Required. In most cases, this field will already be filled in, and you will never need to change it. Your Williams User ID is your initials followed by a number (e.g. abc1) or the first letter of the first name followed by up to 7 letters of the last name (e.g. jdoe). Getting this correct is key- it’s the only way WordPress can associate the information you enter here with with your PeopleSoft data.

    Primary Profile Site

    You can use the same profile on multiple department websites. Decide which site you’d like to do your profile editing on (let’s say the History site, because you edit other pages there as well).  On other department websites that display your profile (e.g. Leadership Studies), select “History” from the pulldown menu for primary profile site, and leave the rest of the profile blank. When visiting your profile on Leadership Studies, people will see information pulled from the History site.

    Hide Degree Dates

    By default, your education section will list the years in which you received your degrees. Check off this box if you’d prefer not to display the years.

    Editor toolbar

    Many of the profile sections have a simplified WYSIWYG editor that allows you to add more complex content. To upload an image, or upload a pdf/document use the “Add Media” button (orange arrow, below).

    profile-wysiwyg

    To add a section header, place your cursor in a text block, and select “Header 3” from the formats pulldown menu (outlined in red below). This is most often used for the  “Other Information” section, which does not come with its own header. You can add more than one Header 3 if you need multiple sections. The Header 4 format can be used to separate related subsections, such as books vs. articles under “Scholarship/Creative Work”.

    profile-h3-wysiwyg

    Heading 3 – sample section title

    Heading 4 – sample subsection title

    Examples & Ideas

    Here are a few customized profiles that show some of the possibilities:

    • Phoebe Cohen (geosciences) uses a custom profile image that shows her interests.
    • Ben Benedict and Aida Laleian (art) use photo galleries to display their creative work.
    • Heather Williams (biology) uses the “Other” section to showcase her birdsong research interests and list her thesis students.
    • Manuel Morales  (biology) in addition to listing his publications, provides links to download them as PDFs or view them on the web.
    • Justin Crowe (political science) uses his “Other” section to publish downloadable course syllabi.

Navigating Williams Sites

The Williams web universe is surprisingly large and rich with content. To facilitate locating the specific piece of information you seek at the moment, we have done our best to make the site-wide search box ubiquitous and smart (it's in the top-right of most pages). When you enter a term into the search box, we match it against a list of keywords drawn from our most popular pages. When a match is found, a link to that page is displayed directly below the search box -- try it now or expand the box below for an illustration. The search box also checks the faculty/staff directory, so you can use it to quickly look up a colleague. If you don't find a quick match, click the "Go" button and our Google-powered search engine will likely find what you are looking for.

  • Search

    The page you want is one click away.

    The search box, in the upper right of each page, lets you search for terms on all Williams websites, and look up contact information for Williams employees. Place your cursor in the box (outlined in blue below) and begin typing your search term. As you type, a list of suggested matches will appear.

    navbox

    Website matches

    Websites for offices, departments, and programs will be listed first in the autocomplete suggestions. Exact matches will be shown, as well as related keywords (e.g. “food” will bring up dining services). Related keyword matches are shown in grey italics. To visit any of the websites, just click on the suggested link.

    People matches

    People matches will be shown at the bottom of the suggestions, with a head icon next to each person’s name. Clicking on any of these will take you to their entry in the people directory, where you can find their photo and contact information.

    All results

    If you don’t see what you’re looking for in the autocomplete suggestions, or want to all matches for your search term, click on the purple “GO” button. This will bring you to the full search results page.

    Tips
    • You can activate the navbox by using the keybord shortcut Alt + S, or clicking on the magnifying glass icon.
    • Pressing the Esc key will hide the dropdown menu, while still retaining the search term.
    • You can use the up and down arrow keys to navigate through the autocomplete suggestions. Clicking return with a autocomplete suggestion highlighted will bring you to the web page or people directory entry.
    • Press Tab to navigate forward and Shift+Tab to navigate backward between the input field, the ‘Go’ button, the Cancel (X) button, and the items in the dropdown menu.

    Directories

    The green directory tabs can be found on the search results page (type in any term to the search box and click “GO”). You can also jump directly to the A-Z index from your Quick Links – by default, it’s the first item on the list.

    directories

    A-Z Index: Links to all Williams departments, offices, and programs, organized alphabetically.

    People: Look up contact information for a specific student, faculty, or staff member, or see a list of all people in a department. How to get your directory information updated

    Departments & Offices: Find the phone number & mailing address for any building or department on campus.

To learn more about Williams' online tools and website policies, visit the web services section of the communications department website.

Help with WordPress

This site, wordpress.williams.edu, contains the most up-to-date WordPress documentation. You'll find a site-specific search box in the sidebar of each page that should help you find answers to your questions. If you can't find the answer or need additional help, you may always email [email protected] and we will work with you to find a solution.

The web team also provides WordPress training upon request. Email us at [email protected] to set up a training session.

Regards,
The Williams Web Team