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Communicating about Rutgers
Rutgers logo
Communicating about Rutgers
Rutgers logo
Communicating about Rutgers
Rutgers logo
Communicating about Rutgers

Words on Websites #2

This issue of Words on Websites was originally sent to the Rutgers Communicators Network on January 9, 2025

🌐Words on Websites: RCCL Site-building Guides | Image Optimization | Office Hours

Happy New Year, Communicators

This is your next installment of Words on Websites. These occasional emails offer information on best practices for website content management and production, tips for getting the most out of the Rutgers Core Component Library (RCCL) website building tool, and helpful resources from University Communications and Marketing, the Rutgers community, and elsewhere online. 

🔧New Website Building Guides
Are you building or refreshing an RCCL website and not sure where to begin? We've created new step-by-step guides to help! Whether you're a new RCCL user or need a refresher, these guides cover the most common content creation scenarios RCCL users face.

📷Optimizing Images for Better SEO

The images you choose to put on your website impact how your site performs in search. Correctly optimizing images can benefit your site’s SEO, the user experience, and more. 

  • Name files descriptively so they can be easily understood by humans and search crawlers (e.g., "red-winged-blackbird.jpg" instead of "IMG1234.jpg")

  • Use alt text that accurately describes the image's content for accessibility and SEO.
    Keep alt text short and descriptive (e.g., “Rutgers students in a classroom”)

  • Choose appropriate file formats: use JPEG for photos and PNG for graphics.

  • Compress images to reduce file size and improve page load speed, a vital ranking factor. The bigger the image file, the longer a page takes to load. Long load times are a bad user experience and also negatively impact SEO. Generally, images on websites should be kilobytes (kb) in size, not megabytes (MB). 

    • The latest update to the RCCL puts a 2MB cap on image uploads to curb excessively large image files from being added to sites

Read more on optimizing images on the web from Adobe. Remember that Rutgers employees have access to the entire Adobe Creative Suite, including Photoshop.

 🌐RCCL Update

Currently, 60 websites are built with RCCL, with another 30 currently in development.

Version 3.0.1 of RCCL released a major version update, moving the RCCL to the Drupal 10 framework. All new Drupal RCCL projects now use Drupal 10 (D10). Existing RCCL sites on Drupal 9 will need to be migrated to D10.  A majority of RCCL websites are hosted and maintained through OIT-Web Consulting Services (WCS) and use its “upstream” deployment of RCCL. These sites, whether in production or development, will be moved to the latest version by WCS on a rolling basis.

✅Office Hours Poll

Would you be interested in attending an online “office hours” session with the UCM web team?  If so, please complete the poll below.

Poll: What topic would you like to discuss?

📣ICYMI

Don’t forget about these resources as well: 

 

Until next time.