Caltech Sites  /  FAQ

FAQ

Publish pages as you go! Do not try to hide them by just saving them as drafts.

Instead, edit your home page and choose one of the privacy options to restrict access to your entire site.

It is hard to get attention for small sites. My advice is: 

  1. Always refer to the site by its preferred name https://<somename>.caltech.edu. No www, no 'sites'. 
  2. Publicize this url where you can, for example: your Caltech directory entry and LinkedIn profile.
  3. Ping Google your sitemap to get crawled and indexed. Keep in mind that submitting a sitemap is merely a hint: it doesn't guarantee that Google will download the sitemap or use the sitemap for crawling URLs on the site. Simply copy the URL below, replace <somename> with your site, and enter it into a browser:
    https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://<somename>.caltech.edu/sitemap.xml
  4. (Optional) Register for Google Analytics and Google Search Console so you can submit your site to be crawled. To claim your site in Google, follow the Setup Google Analytics and Google Search Console instructions in Search Engine Optimization.

Type your link text and click the link button in the Rich Text editor's toolbar. You will need to use the "External Link" option and enter the relative URL for the page plus the id to which you want the browser to scroll. For example, to link to the section of the "Special Purpose Blocks" page about this FAQ block, you would enter:

/blocks/special-purpose-blocks#accordion-block

Heading Blocks and heading tags created in the Rich Text editor automatically generate ids suitable for creating deep links.

Note:

  • You cannot customize the id text
  • You will need to remember to change links to these headings if you ever change the heading text.

When using the Rich Text editor, the 'return' key gives you a new paragraph (with space between the new line and the line above). If you want a new line but without space between it and the line above, either use the line break icon (to the left of the link icon) or use the keyboard shortcut: hold down the shift key while you press return.

Line One (start of a new paragraph)
Line Two (new line without a new paragraph)
Line Three

On MacOs, you can insert a non-breaking space by holding down your option key while typing a space. I don't know if there is an equivalent keyboard shortcut in Windows.

Images on this site often have a small magnifying glass in the lower right hand corner, known as a zoom icon. Clicking on that brings up a popup window showing the full sized image. Images added using the rich text editor have this automatically added to them. If you want to prevent the image from being given a zoom icon, the image needs to be less than than 300px tall or narrower than 400px wide.

Although you can password protect a page, the video you are hosting somewhere else has their own permission settings. Please check the privacy setting pages of the video sharing platform you're using to host your videos.

For YouTube videos, please refer to their Change video privacy settings page. In the "About privacy settings" section, it goes into detail about the available settings: public, private, and unlisted. As of writing this, there is no option to password protect a video.

For Vimeo videos, please refer to their Privacy settings overview page. As of writing this, password protection is available but you will need to purchase a subscription plan.

There is no automatic homepage link in the site navigation. You can always get to the home page by clicking on the site title.

If you want a "Home" link in your navigation, you should make a "Redirect Page" titled "Home" and have it redirect to your homepage. 

You can't. Forcing a link to open in a new window is not considered good accessibility practice. Because users may not be able to identify when a new tab opens, opening in a new tab "breaks" their back buttons and disrupts their experience of your site.