In late 2017
and early 2018, all of the University of
Florida/IFAS Extension county websites
switched over to a new platform. My name
is Maia McGuire and I'm an extension
agent in the Flagler County office.
What i'd like to do is take a little bit
of time to help you navigate the new
website
and show you some of the new features
and where you might find things that
used to be somewhere else.
Okay, so how do we get to one of the
county websites?
For each county, you simply type in the
county name,
so i'm going to use flagler,
and then you're going to do .ifas.ufl.edu
And then i hit enter. This pulls up the
new county websites.
They're all going to look essentially
the same, with
three sliding pictures at the top.
And for each of these pictures there's a
little description. You can click on the "find out more"
and it will take you to that program
area that's represented by the picture.
So in this case it would take you to the
agriculture page.
But if we just scroll down on the main
web page,
what you'll notice are a bunch of
pictures.
These are actually blog posts, and you
can click on each of these individually
to open up the particular blog post and
be able to read much more.
So let's say you see this tax refund
thing
and it looks enticing. If you click on
the title for it,
it will open up the entire blog post in
blogs.ifas.ufl.edu.
You can just use the back arrow to go
back to the main website.
It may be apparent to you that all of
the posts on this page
are focused on a particular topic.
If we scroll back up a little bit, just
above the calendar here,
you may be able to see it says, "sort by
your interest."
We can click to open a drop down
menu which shows you the different program
areas within the Flagler County
Extension Office.
Now there's some algorithm that is used
to determine which program
area posts are likely to be of most
interest to you,
and those are what you will see when you
open the website.
We have no control over this. However, you can use this drop down menu to select a
different program area's blog posts.
So, if I click on natural resources,
rather than work and life, it will take a
second...
The page will reload and when I scroll
back down to the blog posts,
I'll be able to see the posts that have
been written on blogs
tagged with natural resources and
Flagler County Extension Office.
There may be some duplication between
program areas because sometimes a
particular post is
pertinent to more than one program area.
So that's part of the lower section of
the website.
Let's take a look at the calendar here.
So this actual physical calendar
will have events marked on it for the
current month.
And then below the calendar are upcoming
events, either
within this month, or in future months.
If we want to find out a little bit more
about some of these events,
like what they are and how to get
involved,
we can click on the "view all upcoming
events"
or the "view all local events" links
above and below the calendar. So if we
click on "view
all upcoming events,"
we've actually just opened a new tab on the UF/IFAS
Extension calendar site--still looking at
Flagler County posts,
but within that master site. And what
you'll see is that each event is listed
again here with the descriptions,
and in some cases the links. So we can
just close this tab
to go back to the main Flagler County
site.
If we scroll up to the very top of the
website,
in the upper right hand corner there's a
little thing that looks like three
parallel lines,
and it has the tiny word "menu" underneath it.
Our web team affectionately refers to
this as the hamburger,
and this is the main menu for the site.
When we click on the menu--that hamburger--
we'll get a drop down that shows all the
different program areas,
and a couple of other resources that are
available that are specific to our
website.
If you're looking for something like
somebody's email address, or the phone
number, or the mailing address
the easiest place to go is the staff
directory.
When we click on that, it again takes us
out of the Flagler County-specific site,
and into a UF site. This is a listing of
all of the staff and faculty in the
Flagler County
office, complete with our email addresses,
our phone number,
our fax number, and our mailing address.
It also says for each of us which
program area
or what responsibility we have in the
office.
So if we click on the back button to go
back to the main site,
and click on that hamburger again,
let's look at one particular program
area page,
just to give you an idea of how they're
laid out.
I'm going to take you to my marine and
coastal page because it's one i'm very
familiar with.
If we scroll down on that page, what
you'll see
are three images and below each image
is a clickable link. So these happen to
be my three main program areas,
and if you clicked on the link you would
find out more information about each of
those specific topics.
But towards the bottom of the page,
there's this blue box
that says "resources."
Each of our program pages will have one
of these blue boxes.
It will appear at first glance to be the
same
as on the other program area pages, but
if you look closely,
the eight specific links within this box
are customized for each program area.
So mine has a link for my aqua notes
newsletter.
It has a link to a Sea Grant marine
careers
website, the Florida Sea Grant page, the
national Sea Grant website and so on.
One thing that is pretty common to all
the program areas
is a link to what we call the EDIS
website.
This is our IFAS printable fact sheets
site and this is a great place to go if
you're looking for information about
almost any topic.
Okay if we want to go back to the main
Flagler County
Extension page again, we're going to go
back to our hamburger
and click on home.
It takes a second to reload, and then
here we are! So hopefully this will help
you navigate our new site,
and hopefully we will see you using it
more. Thanks
