How to Name an Asset

Training Video

Cascade automatically builds the live URLs for their pages based on the folders the page is in and the name of the page itself. Because of how the Internet works, and for SEO purposes, it is very important to name new folders, pages, or other assets you create correctly.

If you have already completed Cascade training and you have a live asset with which to work, please follow along using your real asset. If you are using this guide for practice, please always use the _playground site. Yes, it starts with an underscore. It is a test site specifically meant for practicing.

Every page asset in Cascade can have up to three different "labels." These are the name, title, and navigation title of the page. Below is a side-by-side comparison of a page asset displayed in the editor next to the same asset selected in Cascade and displaying in the workspace.

The name will always contain the type of asset before it in the label. In this case, it is the Page Name. If this were for a document, it would read, "Document Name," instead. Here, I've conveniently named the page, "name," so you can see which field is the name. Once created, you will see the name of an asset displayed in the Explorer.

The Page Name will also create the last part of the URL on the live page. See the video lesson on How URLs Work to learn more.

Your page's title is what a user will think of as the name of the page. It appears directly along the top and in the code is marked as the only Heading 1 (or "h1" in developer-speak) on the page.

The Navigation Title (optional) field is not mandatory. However, if you want to create a smaller title that appears in the side nav (it also appears in the top nav, which is not viewable inside of Cascade, and so it is not shown in the example image here), you can use this field to do that. The normal, longer title, will still display on the top of the page. The example uses a longer nav title, but that is just for training purposes.

When naming an asset (this is only for the name, and does NOT include the Title or Navigation Title), you must avoid using capital letters, special characters (like the ampersand, apostrophes, accent marks, etc.), spaces, or punctuation.

You MUST use hyphens instead of spaces. Do NOT conjoin words, and do NOT separate them using an underscore or a space. Use hyphens, also known as dashes.

Do NOT use punctuation, EXCEPT for a dot at the end of a name when uploading a document or an image. We call these dots instead of periods to hopefully avoid confusion. In fact, uploaded documents and images MUST have a dot followed by their file type suffix at the end, or they will not work correctly. To be clear, below are just examples. Not all documents will be PDFs, and not all images will be jpgs.

Whenever you create a new asset in Cascade, whether it is uploading a file or creating a new folder or page, Cascade will always have an example in the Name field to remind you that you have to follow the correct naming conventions.

Similar to how the name field uses only lowercase letters and always includes a hyphen in lieu of a space, the Title field always includes capitals and a space. The Navigation Title field works just like the title field, but is left blank by default.

Do not forget to update the Title field, too. Here, you can use capitals, spaces, apostrophes, etc. In the example below, I have copied and pasted the File Name into the Title field, then I go back and manually capitalize everything and remove spaces.

The file is now attached to the editor, the File Name now follows proper naming conventions, and it has a proper English language title.

You will notice that the original file name for that attachment is not altered and will not be altered on your computer or wherever you have uploaded it from.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the Web Team by going to sandiego.edu/web-requests.