If you are the site owner, remember to read these pages then make them draft (to refer to later). Or just delete them, along with the other pages and posts.
Help for Beginners
Free sites
Free = DIY (or ask a friend).
For email support you need a paid up plan or at least a decent one-off donation to Sustaining Dunbar.
Nota Bene
We have re-set the privacy options on your new site. Your site will NOT be immediately public until you are ready to go live.
Use your new site wisely and check our terms if in any doubt.
Our rules:
- Respect others and think before you publish (we welcome a plurality of views and reasonable discussion and debate, but please be moderate as we are family friendly) …
- Be original, please don’t just duplicate content from other sites or across multiple sites; do not plagiarize or borrow copyright images (our syndicated feed is intended to be useful to the community) …
- Never ever share your user login details unless you are willing to give us your Netflix details …
- With greater power comes greater responsibility …
Enjoy!
Thanks
@ourlocality
Help for Beginners
What are posts?
Posts are news articles or stories, or a blog that is perfectly designed to engage or inform your audience. Posts are the lifeblood of an active and engaging website. Keep your site alive by posting articles regularly. Your followers will know you’re still there.
Many themes from the WordPress stable support multiple post types, so you can choose to engage your audience without too many words – using short text, quotes, images, video embeds etc.
Activate the events plugin to create events posts. Posts and events are syndicated on: https://news.ourlocality.org.
Your stories can be easily syndicated to another website or to your favourite social media, if you know how.
What are categories?
Categories ensure similar articles easier for you and your co-workers to find. By assigning posts to categories, at least one is mandatory, you will you can brigade your content and make your articles look professional.
Multiple categories and tagging are optional extras. Tags are index or key words intended to connect to related topics and should extend categories, not duplicate them.
Too many tags may will confuse, don’t overdo it. Judicious use can help you create a more legible website.
Can I upload media and pictures?
Sure you can but resize larger images before you upload. Width of 2000px is a good guide, and use a 4:3 or 16:9 format ratio in landscape. Smaller pics are fine, but beware they won’t look so good as featured images, the format of which will dictated by the template you use.
Ensure that you have permission to use any images that you publish. Use photo sharing sites if you have significant image management demands. Use document sharing sites for pdfs.
Your free site is limited to 256Mb or 256 images of 1Mb. Although the upper size limit is 10Mb, self evidently shrinking images is a good idea if you are using the free plan and want to have more than 25 images at max size.
What about comments?
By default comments are closed to protect you from spammers. Remember to configure your settings appropriately, especially those relating to user registration (also turned off by default).
Enable comments very selectively e.g. on a page or only for posts AND only if you are prepared to monitor and manage SPAM.
If you enable comments YOU MUST MUST MUST have a GDPR policy. Think it through carefully before enabling comments.
What Themes can I use?
Some of our themes may look basic, but conceal many hidden functions, though some also offer not so useful premium services (we do not benefit and we don’t normally recommend them).
More themes are also available at wordpress.org/themes. Ask very very nicely or make a decent donation and we’ll consider adding a new theme just for you. Pick wisely and make sure it will work under the latest version of WordPress, which as we write is 6.0.x.
If you’re experienced, go for a block theme. You can tailor these quite flexibly, but be prepared to spend days and weeks on getting it right. See below.
We won’t upload any old theme, and definitely will not tolerate a nulled theme you downloaded from the internet. Commercial themes that have been modified to work without a licence are not allowed.
How about pages?
Pages will contain infrequently changing blurb about you or your organisation – e.g. Contact Us or About Us, but can also be important pages like your front page or any special landing page – for a big event or an initiative.
You can insert pretty much anything into a page, including your latest news, ready made patterns and all the blocks that come with WP by default.
However, many of the things that feature on post types, like categories and tags, and date stamp, are missing on pages and not so suitable for date sensitive information.
Like posts they can support different page templates and can be useful in creating thematic areas for your content.
Use pages and menus to help you create an initial legible website structure, but remember that pages are not checked very frequently by search engines, so only publish them when you are ready to go (or make your site non searchable while you play).
Use posts to keep your readers up to date. Keep your post to page balance as high as possible if you want to engage your audience and be noticed.
If you create an important new page or if updating a page, signpost the change with a post announcing the new item. Page items are not syndicated and the content is less easily found by search engines.
If you want your new site to be invisible (while you make changes) make it hidden from search engines or make it available only to logged in users. Only use this option temporarily or you’ll quickly fade into obscurity.
Can I manage Menus?
Since WordPress 3.0 you can configure the menus very flexibly, automatically of by hand. Page stubs can be created straight from the Customizer, where most of the website structural configs can be found.
You can link to pages, posts, categories, tags and obviously external sites too.
Some themes support a social menu and may offer a number of menu positions – margins and footers if supported. Menus can be placed directly in pages too, sometimes handy.
Block themes dispense with customizer, but Edit Site will give you the option to tailor the navigation block.
What about the right hand column and footer?
These are optional areas which can be configured to add static content, like images or dynamic content, like a list of recent posts or comments. These are called widgets in the pre-block theme template jargon.
Each theme supports a variety of widget positions, which should stack vertically on a mobile responsive theme.
Widget management is enabled in one of 2 ways, if you want the old way, activate the classic widgets plugin.
What are blocks and can I disable them?
Blocks are the new layout system in WordPress, since version 5.0 (December 6, 2018). So, not that new really.
Blocks are flexible design elements, which, much like widgets can be placed anywhere in the content area of a page.
Blocks (and patterns or ready made block assemblages) enable anyone with a bit of creative imagination to design good looking front pages or landing pages with a clear call to action.
What about Block themes?
We have a smattering of these. If you are feeling adventurous and have time on your hands, pick wisely and give it a go.
Block themes dispense with the customizer and use the editing functions from the Block editor.
However when you edit a block theme, take greater care as you are editing the template, which in most cases has many moving parts.
And if want to make my website private?
Plenty of options. You can stop search engines, e.g. during site development, in Settings > Privacy. Once public News is also published on ourlocality.org/news. Single articles can be made private or password protected. Or you can go into stealth mode and hide yourself from the world entirely, until you’re ready to go public.
You can find this article here:
https://ourlocality.org/starters/first-things-first/
The template website here:
https://ourlocality.org/starters/
Donate:
https://ourlocality.org/donate/
While most of the software we use is free, we pay for a big fat server, the registration forms, SSL management and someone to keep an eye on everything.
Paying customers are necessary and donations also help us keep it free for those that really cannot afford to pay (a project without a sponsor or bank account – relbus.org.uk is a good example – would qualify).
If you receive free support an are feeling flush: https://ourlocality.org/donate/
Extra help: