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Linnea Ann Williams

Linnea Ann Williams's Blog Posts

Writing for the Web #1: Calls to Action

Submitted by Linnea Ann Williams on July 16, 2013 - 11:17 am

Get people more engaged in your content! With this post, I'll outline two basic guidelines for writing good Calls to Action to lead users through your site.

What is a Call to Action?

A Call to Action is a snippet of text with a link, sometimes styled as a button or with an arrow after it. Use Calls to Action when you want to get your readers to do something — whether it's to click through to another page, download a document, or even purchase something. A few basic academic examples might be: 

Menu Tricks #3: Automating Virtual Menu Position for Specific Content Types

Submitted by Linnea Ann Williams on June 27, 2013 - 9:00 am

As a serious navigation advocate, it drives me crazy to have an active "Blog" or "Calendar" link in my main menu when I'm looking at the overview pages for that section, but then the active link goes away when I look at a specific Event or Blog Post. Am I in the Calendar section or not?

Enter one of my favorite Drupal modules: Menu Position.

Getting Your Priorities in Order: An Agile Product Owner Overview

Submitted by Linnea Ann Williams on June 17, 2013 - 9:00 am

Last December, my coworker Zach Chandler wrote a great blog post on the core principles of Agile Project Management and how to think about them in relation to web development at Stanford. In Zach's "Be Careful What You Ask For" section he briefly outlines the challenges for the Product Owner (primary decision maker) in Agile projects: balancing the power to change project direction with budget and time constraints. In this post, I'd like to go into the role of the Product Owner in a bit more depth.

Sites Superstars: Stanford Alpine Club

Submitted by Linnea Ann Williams on May 8, 2013 - 5:31 pm

The Stanford Alpine Club (SAC) recently transitioned to a new website on Stanford Sites. All styles are custom written into CSS injector to reflect the new Stanford identity and SAC has leveraged some of the responsive behaviors of Stanford Modern to make their site mobile friendly. Okay, I admit it. I built this site... :)

Way to go Alpine Club and be safe out there!

Menu Tricks #1: Improve Site Navigation with Menu Blocks Module

Submitted by Linnea Ann Williams on February 6, 2013 - 2:59 pm

The main menu in Drupal is a very powerful tool when partnered with the right modules and configurations.  The menu can be used to automate URLs, build breadcrumbs and create secondary navigation.  

In this post, I'll be walking through a module that can help you use the main menu to automate all of your menus and simplify your secondary navigation.

Using Box to House Online Documents

Submitted by Linnea Ann Williams on January 14, 2013 - 4:53 pm

One of the needs that we frequently encounter on campus while building sites is linking to forms and documents like pdfs from within text areas like the body field in Drupal. Note: I've updated this blog post to reflect the newest version of Box as of 9/24/2014.

The Old Way

The old way to link to documents was through Drupal's file system.  One approach might be:

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