Best Practices & RedDot Tips
Home Page
- Pop-up blocker must be OFF in your browser - RedDot requires the use of popup windows.
- Some pages on your site (such as Advocacy) may be in Convio rather than Reddot. If a url starts with “act.alz.org” that indicates you will need to seek Convio help. Contact Aline Stone.
- Homepage banner dimension: 511 x 130
- You cannot use double quotes in the home page banner title (apostrophe is fine)
- Cannot change the link of a colorbar callout – you have to make a new one and either leave or remove other ones
- When linking to a jumplink on a subpage from a callout, you have to create it as an external link
- Multiple uses of reddots –
o Home page ‘link’ has 2 red dots
§ The first one lets you link to a subpage
§ The second one has 2 function:
· assign link name/text
· link to external URL
o Colorbar callout –
§ First red dot allows you to link to a subpage
§ The 2nd red dot is used for:
· adding link to external page
· removing of ALL callout items in that section (page 78)
· reordering of ALL callout items in that section
- Can’t link to same subpage from 2 different colorbar callout items
Text Editor Formatting
- Line break vs. paragraph break – (shift + enter vs. enter)
- Don’t change font family or color of text as it will lose the assigned stylesheet formatting and your site content won’t be consistent.
- Always use ‘Paste unformatted’ (otherwise VB script errors, page formatting problems) unless you are copying from within Reddot only.
- Don’t use underline as a text style. This is reserved for links.
- Making bulleted lists includes:
o Entering list items with a return in between them
o Highlighting the whole list of items
o Click the ‘List item button’
o Leave ‘Default’ selected or select list type
o Click OK
o Formatting is taken care of for you
TABLES
- For tables, use pixels instead of percent
- You can set horizontal and vertical alignment for all cells in the table dialog box when you create the table
- When creating a new table, set the border to 1. For tables, when you want borders of a table turned back on later, you have to call Support
- Set column widths in top row before entering content into table
- If you insert an image larger than your specified column width, the image width overrides your column width, so make sure your images are sized appropriately first.
- Don’t use the Tab Key to navigate between cells – use your cursor or the keyboard arrow keys. It will affect the margins on your page. Call Support to fix.
Linking
- Use “_blank” when opening a PDF, Word doc or external website so that users are not taken away from your site.
Asset Manager
- Filenaming convention is useful for finding things later
- Switching folders in Asset Manager: In Asset manager, there is a link at the top by the page number that says ‘Switch folder’ where you can navigate between core images (or docs) and ones you have uploaded to your folder
Publishing
- Publishing process – Support nor other users can see your pages in Draft mode, so if you need Support to help you on a page, please push it through to workflow.
- For home page callouts or navigation changes, the “3rd step” of publishing must follow normal publishing. This means opening the dot, right-click, and choose the SECOND box “all related” for both the homepage callout area, and the top of the navigation dot “open nav.”
Page
- You only need one container per navigation level. For example, if I have ‘Calendar’ as a level 2 item under ‘Professional Trainings’, when I made another page under ‘Professional Trainings’, the container is already there, so I don’t have to make a new one.
Address Changes:
- Chapter Address changes – this information is pulled from the National Database. Contact Melissa Martinelli to update information, which will automatically populate into footer.