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.