Hello,
I wanted to let everyone know that Serena the company that owns our Collage CMS product has decided to stop development on the product. This means that there will be no new versions or enhancements to the product. While we still have support into the foreseeable future, we (the Web Team) believe that this is an opportunity to look at alternative solutions.

So what does this mean for you?

At this point nothing will change; we will continue to use Collage while we evaluate our future direction. In the upcoming months we will be calling on you to aid us in requirements gathering and product evaluation.
As I can only assume many of you will have questions; please post them below and I will respond to them the best I can.

Joel

We’re proud to announce the release of the new version of the UW-W homepage to a public beta. The new site is a culmination of months of planning and development. We hope you like the fresh new look and find it easy to use and navigate. You can view the site here: http://beta.uww.edu. Please let us know what you think of the site and take a while to get accustomed to the new site, so that when we launch it into production you know where things are.

As i discussed in my last article on search engine optimization (SEO) there are many factors that figure into where you rank on a search engine. There are basically 3 keys. Of which I’ll touch on in this 3 part series.

The first key is properly using meta tags. Meta tags can be a big help to your search ranking, but if used improperly can actually hurt your rankings. There are two tags to work with here, three if you count the title tag, which for all intensive purposes I will include because it’s in the same place.

Getting started
Lets take look at what these tags do and then see how to use them to our advantage.

Read more…

When posting content from Microsoft Word on the web. There are a few things to remember so that you don’t end up having to go back and reedit your documents.

First and foremost Word does funky things to formatting, especially when it comes to quotes and fonts. In order to make your word files look good; whether your posting in your blog or creating content in Collage or even in Dreamweaver, watch out for quotes because while these look “good” if you do it wrong they look like this ?quote? and no one likes these. So what’s the best way to fix this problem, I bring you two solutions one using Dreamweaver and the other a little bit more work.

The easy way first. In Dreamweaver make a new HTML page and then paste your word content into the design view. It should look exactly like the text out of Word. Onto the clean up, under the Commands tab at the top select the clean up word HTML option, the defaults will work just fine and hit okay. Dreamweaver will now run through the code and strip out all the unwanted Word formatting and leave you with code you can paste into any web based WYSIWYG editor.

Now for the multi step way. From Word open up notepad (easy way is to hit start > run and in the dialog box type notepad) from here paste the content from Word into notepad. Because notepad can’t understand the Word formatting it just skips it but you will need to walk through your text just to make sure everything is as you want it to be, as it doesn’t clean it up like Dreamweaver does. Once you’ve walked through your text; in notepad now you can paste it into what ever web editor you wish.

Hope that helps rid you of the many headaches that can arise when pasting from Word. Have other tips on cleaning up word text? Post a comment.

Any one has spent a little time using the Collage editor knows that sometimes it just doesn’t do what you want it too. I have a little helper to fix some of those pesky issues.

Highlight the content that is not displaying correctly and then down at the right corner of the editing box there is a link that says clear formatting. Voila, bad formatting gone!