Quick Tips for Building Pages in Drupal

Hint: You may want to bookmark this page so that you can refer to it regularly.

  • When creating links to other pages on the site or to document files you have uploaded, always convert your link URL path to a relative URL by removing the server part of the URL (e.g. for the URL 'https://www.gatech.edu/about', you would remove everything before '/about'). A relative link does not include a server name (domain name) and always starts with a forward slash. If you don't do this, and your website's domain name should ever change in the future (this does happen occasionally when a unit decides to change their official name), then you'll have lots of broken links to fix.

  • With Drupal, you will need to resize your images before you upload them. Some image fields will automatically size down your images for you, but others do not. If you upload too large an image, it will then throw off your entire page layout.

    You may note that CKEditor does let you resize an image after it is placed. You should not use this feature, as it simply tells the browser to squeeze the image down into the specified space. It does not affect the uploaded file. So, if you upload a 10MB 4000px wide file (e.g. straight from a camera) and use CKEditor to fit it into a 400px space, the end user will still be sent that 10MB file, which can make the page take forever to load on a slow home or mobile connection.

  • We do not have an autocrop feature in Drupal, so when resizing your images, you will need to crop them appropriately so that they look good (autocrop, when available, has a nasty habit of cutting off the tops of people's heads, so it's never been a recommended concept.)

  • The general rule of thumb is to 'go with the flow' and try to work with what the layout system is offering you. If you feel like you're fighting the system, you're likely trying to do something that isn't appropriate for the website. If you're not sure, by all means ask the college web developer for advice.