Tools, techniques and tips for managing College websites
The following new features have been released for ‘My Imperial’:
1. Outlook Web Access (Outlook tab) – view all your email, calendar and tasks without having to sign on.
2. Met Office Weather (Home tab)
3. TFL Journey Planner (Home tab)
4. Student e-Service (My Admin tab) – no need to sign on to enter this website.
We hope you find the new features useful.
Single Sign On will allow you to open other applications within ’My Imperial’ by logging in only once. It will give you the ease of accessing all favourite applications with only a click of the button!
The first time you use ‘My Imperial’ to link to other applications you may be asked to login. If so, enter your username and password for this application and it will open normally. The next time you click on the link or the icon it will automatically log you in.
You will be asked to enter in your username and password. Once you have logged in again with your new username and password then it will not be necessary to enter it again unless your password changes or expires.
The whole login process has been approved by the College’s ICT Security team and your details are protected.
Personalisation provides individual users with the flexibility to make content changes on their ‘My Imperial’ webpage.
This functionality will allow you to view content that you find relevant. By clicking on the 
button in the top right hand corner, you can access the 
‘ Personalise’ links, through which you can change the default settings / content initially set up for you. The content includes which pages to see, which portlets within a page to see, and for some portlets, what content to see. New content will be added to the ‘My Imperial’ webpage, and you can enable its viewing through the personalise links.
Over time the default settings for student, staff etc will change as new content is added. You can revert back to the default settings by restoring defaults and this can be done for:
Note on restoring defaults – This will reset your pages and their content to the default settings. You will lose any additional ‘Favourites’ links and ‘News & Announcements’ or ‘Events’ feeds that you may have set-up yourself. Links to do this are on the appropriate areas of the website.
On the ‘My Imperial’ home page there are sections for News and Events. When you come across a relevant event or news RSS feed, either within College, or outside e.g. on the BBC site, you can add it to these sections to receive the updated event and news information.
You can identify RSS or Atom feeds by these icons 
or 
. Often, the icon itself takes you to the XML version of the news or event feed, but sometimes the icon indicates that the adjacent link goes to the feed.
Simple permission setting for a single page can be done using the ‘Access’ link in the footer. However, sometimes you need to set permissions for a set of pages and a ‘bulk update of permissions’ can be useful.
1. You set permissions for a set of pages by logging in on the parent page of the pages you are working on, and going into the ‘Edit’ view of the page.
2. Then go into the ‘List’ view of the page by clicking the ‘Editing Views: List’ link top left under the site banner e.g
You will see a list of the sub-pages and the items for this page.
3. Select the required sub-pages by ticking them. Note that you can only tick the links with a yellow folder icon against them – these are pages. The links with a ‘document’ icon are items within a page and you cannot set permission at item level. Now select the action you want to carry out on the selected pages. In this example they are set to inherit their permission from their parent page.
4. Click on ‘Go’ and the permissions will be adjusted for the selected pages. If you have chosen the ‘Modify Access Settings’ option you will get a page with a ‘Grant Access’ form to enter the name of the user/group to be added to the permissions for the pages.
5. Click on the ‘Editing Views: Graphical’ link to get back to the usual Edit view of your page, or on the ‘View page’ link top right below the blue banner to see the page in the normal browser view.
Search engines such as Google use page titles and the text contained in web pages when building their indexes and ranking search results. Some search engines will also use ‘meta data’ if it is present on a page.
The CMS templates automatically generate some meta data for all pages, so you do not need to manually add meta data at all. However, if you want to try to improve the ranking of some particularly important pages in your site, it could be worth your while spending some time and effort on meta data.
Adding keyword meta data to a page may help to improve the ranking of a page by some search engines by attaching additional words which do not appear in the actual text of the page e.g. a page about ‘training’ could have meta data including the keyword ’teaching’. The page might then be returned in the search results for a user searching for ‘teaching’ even though that word does not actually appear in the text for that page.
Another type of meta data is the description which is displayed in the list of search results by some search engines. An interesting description might encourage an internet user to visit your page rather than others returned in the results list.
Keywords and Description are added in the Edit content view of a content item, and apply to the whole page. The boxes to add them appear below the main editing window.
1. Go to the location in your site where you want the Redirected Page to be.
2. Create a sub-page but choose the page type ‘URL’ from the drop-down list, then click Next>.
3. Insert the required page name (all lowercase, no special characters), then click Next>.
4. Enter the required destination URL into the URL Properties form
5. Click Finish to create the Redirect page.
6. To edit the Page Properties to have the actual Display Name you want for the page, you will need to go to the parent page, click on ‘Edit’ in the footer, then click on the ‘List’ editing view (top right). Click on ‘Edit’ against the URL Page in the list to see the Page Properties form.
Note that you cannot have sub-pages beneath a URL redirect page
You can also view a video on how to set up a redirect.
Alternatively you could use Javascript. This is done by adding a html portlet and inserting the following code:
<script>
Window.location.href=”url”;
</script>
Where the url = http://www.
Note that this method shows the original page for a very brief time before directing to the new address.
Google Search Appliance was chosen by the College in the Summer of 2009 as the best suited search engine for Imperial’s requirements. ICT operates the College search engine.
The Google Search Appliance is indexing appropriate College web content (HTML, word documents, pdfs, blogs etc), including the Content Management System (CMS), Medicine CMS, sites on the Windows and Linux web farms, the Imperial College Union site, etc.
The index includes publicly available content as well as some permission based content, specifically permission based pages in the CMS that anyone in the College can log in to see. When a user search results in permission based page results, users will be asked for their username and password before they can view the content. Any content restricted to a smaller subset of College members will not appear in the search index.
Pages can be moved between directories (parent or root pages), copied and deleted in the list view of the page. To move a page click the Edit button at the bottom of a page (if you cannot see this page you are either not logged in or do not have manage permissions for this area of the website, see Setting Permissions for more details). Click the list link at the top of the graphical edit page.
You should now see the list view editing page that contains a list of all the pages in the current sub-directory shown as folders (since they can hold other pages in the structure). At the bottom of the list will be the content item for the current page.
This page allows you to perform many different tasks on several pages at a time. You can navigate through the website in list view by clicking the underlined display names of pages, to open up that directory, or by clicking areas in the site shown in the Path crumb-trail in the top toolbar, to go up the directory tree.
To move pages select the check boxes next to the names of pages you wish to move to another location and then click the Actions: Move button.
This will display the move wizard.
The move wizard will display only those areas of the website in which you have manage permissions. To move a page to another location email the site owner (webmaster) for the whole site. Click the Move Here link and all the selected pages will be moved to that directory as sub-pages.
Pages can be copied using exactly the same method except the Actions: Copy button is used.
To delete a page check the box next to the page name and press the Actions: Delete button. (Note that a page is denoted by a yellow folder symbol next to it). You will be asked to confirm you wish to delete the page. Remember that if you delete a page you delete all its sub-pages too! We recommend that you never delete a page with sub-pages, but delete the lowest-level pages first, then the level above and so on.
To rename a page browse to the page. If you are logged in, and you have manage permissions for this page, you will see an Edit link at the button of the page between My Imperial and Admin. Click this link.
You will now see an editing page showing the content of the current page, the right navigation tree and the header. There is also a beige toolbar menu across the top of the page. In this toolbar click the Page: Properties link.
This will show Edit Page menu. Here you can change the Display Name, which is displayed in the navigation tree and in the header of the browser, the Name of the page, which will be used to construct the human readable address, and the Description of the page. Be careful to leave only lowercase letters and numbers in the Name field.
Simply click Ok to save your changes.
If you have a very wide image or table which you find does not fit into your page width, there is an option to use a ‘wide’ template. However, this option should only be used in exceptional circumstances as it is a non-standard template. If you do want to use the ‘wide’ template please contact Peter Gillings giving the URL of the page you want this template applied to and a member of the Web Support team will apply it for you.
