Web Resources
The marketing department oversees the development of all Northwestern Engineering-related web communications, including websites, social media accounts, and email newsletters.
The following resources are intended to help representatives of departments, programs, and student groups in building and maintaining these important elements of our brand.
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- Cascade Access and Initial Training
- Cascade Training Video Series
- Cascade User Guides - PDF documents
- Cascade Office Hours
- NUsites Websites for Faculty, Students, and Staff
- Contact the McCormick Web Team
Requesting Cascade Access & Initial Training
If you need to schedule a training session to learn how to administer your website using Cascade, contact the IT team via mccormick-webupdates@northwestern.edu. Please include:
- Name
- Net ID
- Department, center, or group
- The URL for the website you need access to
Cascade Training Video Series
Please click on the links below to view the Cascade YouTube training videos:
Getting Oriented in Cascade
- Logging in and navigating around Cascade 8: Logging into Cascade, exploring the dashboard, understanding the navigation tree, the site structure
and organization in Cascade, and locating most important action items. - Introduction to index pages and metadata: Using the URL to identify pages in Cascade, understanding the role of index pages, identifying key metadata fields: page display name, title, keywords, description, and left navigation display options.
Overview of the Features of a Basic Page
- Editing a basic page: header image/slider: Choosing or replacing the slider image and understanding the process for creating a multi-image slider.
- Editing a basic page: jump menu: Understanding the role of the jump menu, then learning to create a list of links to various content sections of the page along with corresponding anchor tags, introducing the "Return to top" links.
Editing and Publishing a Basic Page
- Editing a basic page: main body content - part 1: Entering, formatting, and editing text in the main content section of the page, copying and pasting text in plain text mode using the "
hot keys ," creating headers. - Editing a basic page: main body content - part 2: Creating hyperlinks, learning about internal and external links and reasons for opening links in the same or new windows, and learning different style tags, including a button and a "Return to
top " link. - Editing a basic page: main body content - part 3: Learning how to insert images and to format them to float them left or right on the page, embedding YouTube videos and optimizing video dimensions on the page.
- Editing a basic page: sidebar: Overview of the four widgets of the sidebar, creating related links, editing the contact sidebar, utilizing the featured sidebar, using and creating sidebar feature blocks and sidebar feature block sliders.
- Submitting and publishing a webpage: Saving a draft of your web pages and learning about submitting and publishing web pages to the development server and to the live server, viewing the publish queue, and learning when the entire site folder needs to be republished.
Working With Images and Documents
- Uploading images & documents: Uploading single and multiple images into Cascade, storing images in Cascade, uploading documents, naming conventions for images and documents.
- Cropping and formatting images in Adobe Photoshop: This video describes how to prepare images for uploading into Cascade.
Website Sections and Pages: Adding, Deleting, Moving, Copying, Renaming, and Re-Ordering
- Creating new website sections and pages: Learning to create a section folder, a basic page, and changing the order of left-navigation menu items on your site.
- Copying/moving & renaming/deleting assets: Correctly copying pages to a new location, renaming your assets, and deleting assets from your site.
People and Faculty Pages
- Editing People Listing Page: Learning how to edit, add, delete, reorder, and group people, such as staff and students.
- Editing Faculty Listing Page: Learning how to link faculty to their existing profiles and to edit, add, delete, reorder, and group faculty members.
- Editing Core Faculty Profiles: Editing core faculty profiles in the main McCormick directory in Cascade.
- Editing Affiliated Faculty Profiles: Learning how to edit or create affiliated faculty profiles (adjunct professors, lecturers, etc.) on the main McCormick site in Cascade.
Events and Course Listings Pages
- Editing events listing page and course listing page: Adding events to the department or program listings, how to edit the course listings page, when to republish it, how to change the order in which the course listings are displayed, how to change the term/year headings on the course listings page.
- Editing course descriptions Part 1: Editing and creating course description pages and hiding courses from the course listings table.
- Editing course descriptions Part 2 (for Programs): Editing course description pages by choosing courses from McCormick department sites.
News
Cascade User Guides
Staff who are responsible for administering their department or center's websites in the Cascade content management system should consult our guides for maintaining websites in Cascade.
- Main (top level) Northwestern Engineering School Website Guide
- Department Website Guide
- Professional Master's Programs Guide
- Research Websites Guide
- Photoshop Instructional Guide
Cascade Office Hours
Cascade office hours are a chance for website admins to stop in and get one-on-one guidance and assistance with current web content questions and plan for upcoming web projects.
NUsites Websites for Faculty, Students, and Staff
Faculty, staff, and students can easily build and manage websites and blogs — free of charge — for academic and research purposes. Offered in partnership with CampusPress, a leading host of the WordPress content management system for educational institutions, Northwestern Sites is a WordPress publishing environment that provides managed security and updates.
Learn more and build your site in NUsites
Contact the McCormick Web Team
To submit your help request, email our support queue at mccormick-webupdates@northwestern.edu.
