Adding a new section (page)

A section is t4 terminology for a web page.

Sections will show automatically in the navigation (on the left or at the top) unless you choose not to 'show in the navigation'. There is guidance on this below (see Creating hidden sections).

All new sections default to the standard content page template. If the page you are working on is a landing page (e.g. the homepage of your website section), you will need to contact your Faculty Web Officer who can change the page layout to one of the three landing page layouts. You can find out more about Page layouts (templates).

Instructions

1. Click the terminalfour logo in the top left of the screen. This will take you to the Site structure view.
2. Hover over the section you want to add a sub-page to and it will highlight in yellow. In the example below I am adding a new sub page under the About us section.
3. Click on the corresponding blue Actions button and select Create section from the menu that appears as shown below.

4. This takes you to a form, below is a completed example for a new Department contacts section (page).

Name

Whatever word or phrase added in the Name field will appear as the title of the page and become the web address (URL), so this field is very important. For example,  if you added Research and Innovation, that would be the page title and: /research-and-innovation/ would be the automatically created URL. In the example above 'Department contacts' will create a URL of /department-contacts/.

Note: T4 will always hyphenate(-) separate words in the page title to form the URL, so please ensure there are no double spaces or spaces at the end of the title, as these will become extra hyphens.

Status

There are three different statuses for a section:

• Approved - this is the default. This means that once you have added content to the page and published it, it will be live on the website.
• Pending - your page and any content will not be published and is awaiting approval. Only Approved content and sections will be published.
• Inactive - This marks your page and any sub pages (and content) for permanent deletion, known as 'purging'. Purging is done weekly on a Monday morning. Once your pages and content are purged, it is not possible to retrieve them.

Section options

• Mark as a link section (unticked by default) - this means that the new section you add will appear in your navigation as a link to another page, so it acts as a pointer and does not contain any content. Please refer to the tab below named How to create a link section for more information on link sections.
• Show in navigation (ticked by default) - when this is ticked (the default option), your new section will show in the navigation menus and in Google search. Of you untick this box it will hide your section (page) from navigation and it may not appear in Google searches, unless you link to the page elsewhere. See the tab How to create a hidden section below for more information on this.
• Archive section (unticked by default) - marks the section including its content and sub pages as an archive. By default, Archive Sections are not published when a site is published. An Archive Section can be used for areas of the site where publishing is not required each time a site is published, e.g., Sections where content may not change frequently. 
• eForm section (unticked by default) - eForms are not used on the Imperial website, so please leave this unticked.

Description

This should be a short summary of the purpose of the page including the main information it contains or calls to actions. The description should contain keywords that your site visitors may be looking for if they are searching for you content via a search engine such as Google. Adding descriptions is recommended to improve the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of your page(s). In the example above 'A list of the key contacts in our departments' is sufficient as this page has a single purpose, providing a list of contacts for the department.

Exclude from All search engines

By ticking this box it will instruct all search engines to exclude this page from search results. This includes Google, Bing and the Imperial website search.

Content owner

Select the Content Owner from the list. If left blank, it will inherit from the parent section. The content owner can be used in workflows or get notified (by email) when content expires.

Output URI

The URI is the final part of the URL which relates to the specific page for example www.imperial.ac.uk/advancement/contact-us 'contact-us' is the URI.

By default T4 creates the URI based on the page title. In some cases a long page title might be needed but you may want a shorter URL. You can override long URLs by specifying a shorter Output URI. For example on this page I might want to shorten it from /department-contacts to /department. To do this I would add 'department' (without the /) in the Output URI field (as shown in the screenshot above). The URI you add should still be meaningful and not use acronyms, abbreviations or initialisms if possible. Please see best practice for URLs.

SEO Key phrases

Add a comma separated list of the key subjects or topics your content covers. Adding these won't improve your search ranking as they are only used as an aid to SEO reporting from within T4. If you add keywords for your pages e.g. medicine, study, apply etc.  then the SEO report will assess your pages according to those keywords. For example it will report how many times those words appear on your pages. This is useful if you plan to analyse the SEO performance of your pages.

There are other factors that influence the ranking your page/site will achieve in search engines, so to please visit the section on increasing the visibility of your website in our web skills area to find out more.

Default workflow and Access key

Leave these as they are as these features are not currently available.

5. Click Save changes to create your section and return to the main T4 Site Structure screen or select Save and edit section to create the section, but move to the Content tab. This is useful if you want to start adding content to the new section straight away.

If you click Save changes you will see the newly created section in the Site Structure as shown below:

Next steps

Add content to your new page

Now you have created your page, you can now start adding content to the page. There are many different content types available and each one has step by step instructions.

Edit the section

You can also edit your section if you want to change any of the details you added when you created the section. You can also learn how to reorder child sections and hide sections from navigation.