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This guide is intended for those who either provide content for their office's (or academic department's) myHill site available from the global navigation dropdown or provide News from the myHill News site.
Table of Contents
Creating a new page
To create a new page in your office's myHill site, first navigate to your office's site homepage. Then, click New near the top-left of the page, and select Page from the dropdown.
You'll be presented with various templates you can choose to start from. Select one, or choose Blank to start with a clean slate, and click the Next button.
Visit Microsoft's support page for a detailed guide on creating and configuring pages in SharePoint.
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Editing myHill Office pages
To modify an existing page on your office's myHill site, first navigate to the page you want to edit, then click the Edit button near the top-right of the page. This will bring the page into edit mode.
In edit mode, SharePoint pages are made up of two primary elements: Sections and Web parts. Each can be configured in different layouts and options by clicking the section or web part in question to select it, and then clicking the pencil icon that appears attached to it.
Sections
Sections are the horizontal rows where content is populated. Sections can be configured in a variety of different layouts of columns for you to arrange your content within. Visit Microsoft's support page for a detailed guide on using sections.
Web parts
Web parts are the actual content you'll populate and configure in the sections you place on your page. There are many to choose from, each with their own strengths and limitations. You'll want to explore what's available to you, try different things out, and choose web parts that you feel best fit your needs for the content you're looking to present on the page. Visit Microsoft's support page for a detailed guide on using web parts.
Filtering by audience
Want to show something only to students/faculty/staff? You're in luck! Navigational links, news posts, files, links, web parts and even entire pages can all be filtered to only appear to specific audiences that you designate. One of the most common uses of this feature is to filter individual links or buttons in a Quick Links webpart to specific audiences based on their role at the College.
Note: This is how content on the myHill homepage is filtered to different roles. If needed,
check here to see what buttons and self-service links are visible to different roles.
The key to doing this correctly is to ensure you're selecting the right role. This is important because while you can select any Office 365 Groups that exist in the global address list, there are groups specifically created by IT for the purpose of filtering myHill content by role, and they have specific names.
For this purpose, each of the primary roles begin with the word "Role", and so this is what you'll want to type first when adding an audience for filtering. Use the table below to ensure you're choosing the correct groups when filtering content by audience.
Note: Keep in mind that when any filter is applied, that element will only appear to people in that role. For example, if you wanted a link to appear to all students, you would need to add the audiences "role - student" and "role - grad student". If you instead only added "role - student", graduate students would not see the link (nor would faculty or staff).
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Publishing pages
As you edit, your changes are always being saved in draft, much like an email message yet to be sent. If the page has never been published before, you'll see a large purple "Publish" button near the top-right. If the page has already been published, this button will say "Republish" instead. In either case, clicking this button won't make the page automatically appear anywhere on your site; you'll still need to create a link to it wherever you'd like one to appear. The button simply commits your changes (saved in draft) to be the new, "current" version of the page that anyone with access to it would see. This lets you make changes to an already existing page without changing what visitors would see until you're ready to commit those changes and update the current revision.
Once you're ready for the page to be visible to visitors, you'll need to copy the link to the page and use it to create a link wherever you'd like it to appear. This can be in your site's navigation if appropriate, or a button or link anywhere on your office's myHill homepage or other pages in your office's site.
Adding pages to your site's navigation
Things to consider before adding pages to navigation
If you want to add a page to your myHill office site's navigation, there are two important things to keep in mind:
- Where possible, links on an office site's navigation should usually be "navigational" in nature - in other words, they should be links to pages where resources are found, rather than links to those resources themselves. If your office has a page or pages representing subgroup(s) within it where resources are organized, those pages should be linked in your site's navigation. Look to the Finance or Nav Center's myHill sites for good examples of this.
- For example - The Navigation for Student Success is made up of 4 subgroups: Academic Advising, Accessibility Resources, Career Development, and Tutoring Services. Each of these has their own page, appropriately linked on the Nav Center's navigation, where a collection of resources unique to each group can be found.
- The Tutoring Services page has a button to book a tutoring appointment. It is more appropriate to link the Tutoring Services page on the Nav Center's navigation, but not the link to the tutoring appointment itself. This is because the "book an appointment" link falls under Tutoring Services, which in turn falls under the Nav Center as an office.
- IT will intentionally maintain office site's presence on the myHill global navigation's "mega menu" to match the link on each site's navigation, making those pages easily accessible from anywhere within myHill.
- Using the Finance site as an example, using the mega menu, visitors looking for the Student Employment page can access it by merely hovering over the Offices dropdown from anywhere within myhill:
How to add pages to navigation
Once you've considered whether to add a given page to your office site's navigation, there are two ways to do it:
If your site doesn't have any links in its navigation yet:
- Go to the page you'd like to add to the navigation, and click the Promote button in the white bar near the top-right of the page:
- A panel will appear on the right side of the page. Click Add page to navigation.
If your site already has one or more links in its navigation:
- Click the Edit link in to the right of the existing navigation links.
- A panel will appear on the left side of the page. Hover your mouse cursor in the white space just beneath on of the existing links, and click the purple + sign that appears. An Add link dialog will appear where you can paste in the URL to the page you'd like to add, type what you'd like it to say (filter to audiences if desired), and click OK when done.
- Once the link is added, you can freely drag-and-drop it up and down the list order to put it where you want to appear. You can also click the kebab menu ( ⋮ ) next to a link to edit it, remove it, or make it a sub-link of another.
- Whenever you've added or changed a link in your site's navigation, be sure to send an email to service-desk@stonehill.edu to let us know, so that we can reflect that change under the link to your site in myHill's global navigation as well.
Filtering site pages by audience
Just like links, site pages can be filtered to only display to specific audiences based on their role at the College.
First, click the Edit button at the top-right of the page. Then, once in Edit mode, click Page Details toward the left side of that same white bar the Edit button appears in:
A panel will open on the right side of the page. Scroll down to the Audience field, and then enter the role you wish to filter by.
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Posting news to myHill
Offices with myHill sites (i.e. those available from the Offices dropdown) can create News items, which will post to the main News webpart on the myHill homepage (as well as on their own site if that site features its own News webpart).
Note: The
myHill News site provides a special site specifically for content managers who do
not have their own office site in myHill (for example: Dining Services, Visual & Performing Arts, the English department, etc). This site shows a list of all the current myHill news.
Create a News post by clicking +New at the top-right of your office's homepage just like you would when creating a page (or if on the myHill News site, you can also click +Add at the top right of the News webpart) and then select an option from the dropdown:
- News post (creates a page where you can provide content that publishes to myHill News)
- News link (creates a news item with no content of its own; just a link to an existing URL).
Publishing your News post
When creating a News post, you'll be presented with the option to choose a template just like when creating any other page (the Blank template is a great place to start). The only real difference between a News post and a regular site page is the fact that when you're done editing your draft and eventually click the purple Post News button for the first time, the post will then immediately appear on the News webpart(s) at that point as the most recent News item, and begin being pushed further down the stack by subsequent newer posts.
You'll still be able to edit/update the content of the post after it's been posted, but you cannot "re-post" it to make it appear at the top of the stack again. If you want to re-post the same content so that it appears at the top again (if you wanted to post the same content each semester or year for example), you should re-create a new copy of the page and then post that copy.
News images
When creating a News post, the image you choose for the top banner, if any, will be the image that shows up for that News item in the News webpart (you can also choose to leave it blank, in which case no image will appear).
Whether you choose an image from the built-in stock images library or upload your own, there are a few key things to remember when choosing an image:
Size & shape
In terms of pixels, more is better! More important than size however is aspect ratio. The image should be "widescreen", or roughly 16:9 in aspect ratio. This ensures that your image won't have parts of it either cut off or with large amounts of dead space when it appears in the News.
Content
This is the most important consideration when choosing an image for a News post. The purpose of the image on a News post is to draw attention, not to convey information. Choose an image that is aesthetically attractive or interesting. Avoid images with text, especially large amounts of text or small text, which are difficult or impossible to read, and are not accessible for those using screen readers. Instead, choose a pleasing image that draws the viewer's attention, and use the post itself to serve up the text and content of the post.
Filtering News posts by audience
Just like links, News posts can be filtered to only display to specific audiences based on their role at the College.
First, click the Edit button at the top-right of the News post like you would to edit any other page. Then, once in Edit mode, click Page Details toward the left side of that same white bar the Edit button appears in:
A panel will open on the right side of the page. Scroll down to the Audience field, and then enter the role you wish to filter by.
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