The online faculty bio is two or three paragraphs highlighting your academic career and areas of expertise. When your bio is available on the UMW Web site, the media have a way of finding and contacting specific faculty members with desired areas of research and expertise.
WordPress stores public information about you in a section called “Profile.” To add your bio to your profile, follow these steps:
Login to WordPress, using your UMW Net ID and Email Password (NOT your UMW Blogs credentials), at the following URL:
http://www.umw.edu/faculty/wp-admin/profile.php (Will open in new window)
OR…
If you are already logged in, go to the upper right-hand side of the screen where your name is and hover over your name. A menu will drop down. Select “Edit my Profile.”
When you get to your profile page, there will be numerous sections that you can edit. Let’s go through each section:
Personal Options and Name
“Personal Options” control how you view WordPress when you are editing your site. Usually, people don’t edit these until they become more familiar with the WordPress environment. These comprise the color of your administrative screens and whether or not you want the black bar displayed at the top when you are logged in. Choose whatever makes it easier for you to work.
The information under the “Name” section is populated through UMW Banner data and automatically updates every 12 hours. This includes your email address, first/last name, account name, nickname, and desired public display name. Any edits you make there will be overriden by the data. If you want your data changed, please contact Human Resources — they manage that information in Banner. The name information is displayed as shown below:
Contact Info
Your email and phone number are populated in WordPress using Banner data. The contact information in the profile section is primarily your social bookmarks. Fill in any social bookmarks you would like to share on the UMW Web site. You need not fill them all in. The image below shows examples of social bookmarks that have been entered in a personal profile. You may click the image to see a larger version for readability.
About Yourself
The following section is where you can write and edit your biography as it will display on your professional pages. After you add your bio, or make any edits, it will post automatically to the website. In addition, it will be forwarded to University Relations copy editors to check for spelling and grammar. If there are any issues, you’ll be contacted first.
Click for enlarged view of bio editor.
Faculty Expertise Information
Every faculty member comes to UMW with specific areas of academic study . At present, there are over 700 areas of expertise in the UMW website database that you can select from. You may select as many as apply to you. You may also add an area if you don’t see it in the list. The media will be searching for specific areas of interest, so it’s best to complete this section if you want to be contacted by the media as resource. Here is how:
Type in a keyword for your interest area. In the example below, my keyword is “Web.” Yours may be “History” or “French.” This will give you a preview of the expertise listings with that term.
Choosing an Existing Expertise Area:
If there are others you’d like to search for/select, click the green “+” sign and you will get another menu where you can repeat the above process.
Repeat as many times as you need to list all of the areas of expertise you would like to show on your bio.
Creating a New Expertise Area
If you don’t see anything applicable on the list, simply keep typing and then click off of the menu. You will see the following, asking if you want to add a new expertise to the database:
Extra Profile Display Options
You’ve seen where bloggers display their Twitter feed, or Flickr photos, in “widgets” on the side of WordPress pages. In the next section, you will be able to select those widgets you would like to display on your page. NOTE: Any social bookmarks you added in the “Contact Info” above will display automatically as icons. The widgets are an additional way to display those same social bookmarks, but with full feeds of recent posts and activity. You may choose to forego them in place of the default icons, or supplement the icons with these widgets. Your choice. Below is an example of widgets having been selected for display:
NOTE: Before checking these boxes, you must first have completed the “Contact Info” with the account names (above) so that WordPress can display the widgets in this section. Otherwise, the page will indicate an error in loading.
When you are done, save your profile. Then visit the following to see how it looks:
http://www.umw.edu/faculty/faculty-member/username (Your UMW username, all in lowercase).
You can always go back and edit/change it at any time.
That’s it!
