First up, we have rolled out Version 5 of WordPress, which ships with a brand new editing experience.
The Block Editor, aka Gutenberg, is reasonably easy to use, but not everyone is in love with it!
So the good news is we’re keeping the Classic Editor as the default for now. If you want to switch over it is easy.
Enable Gutenberg from the plugins and go to Dashboard > Writing to configure how you think you’ll prefer to work with the new Block Editor. We recommend you don’t switch over completely.
Be warned too, there is a bit of learning curve. We’ll be on hand to help anyone who gets mired in the misty wonderscape of blocks. It is a good idea to keep your old text as it is and reserve blocks for new content only. It is easy to switch to Blocks, but not so easy to switch back. Classic Blocks are also available, which is how your old content will initially be presented in the new editor.
So, that is one reason to be cheerful over the Xmas season.
To inaugurate the launch of our Paid Plans* we’re going to reach out to any community group who wants to upgrade their web presence. Perhaps you:-
- a new project, but no funds
- have an old template and want a new responsive one – so it looks great on a phone too
- haven’t published in a while or inherited a website and need to learn the ropes again
- have a tired website project that simply needs a push in the right direction
- you are fed up with social media monetising your information and want to take back control
- want to move a website hosted elsewhere
- want technical help to get a new idea off the starting block …
Every month next year, 2019 we’ll aim to help help out any organisation on a tight budget (or none) that wants to take steps to improve their online presence.
Rules:
- One East Lothian project a month will be supported
- You’ll get the equivalent of a few hours of completely free support over one or 2 sessions – for every hour of help expect to put in at least 2 – 3 hours of your time, a lot more if you have lots of content to prepare
- Reasonable efforts on your part to get the project to take off and land in no more than 4 weeks
(to plan: design: build: test) - The migration must be straightforward and you don’t have needs that cannot be met by our standard setup
- You agree to join a yearly Paid Plan
- If you join our level 2 Paid Plan, we’ll look into setting up GSuite for free
- Contact us with a 2 paragraph proposal setting out your need and case and send it to ourlocality @ sustainingdunbar.org
We can obviously undertake more complex migrations and technically challenging projects, subject to a quote or a day rate.
* Paid Plans are to cover our server hosting costs and software maintenance, if there are any surpluses they get reinvested in improved technologies
