Is our new default theme, i.e. when you fire up a new site.
By all means upgrade to Twenty Twenty Two, if that feels right for you or you fear being left out of the full site editing experience, but we’re old fashioned and prefer the old world editing experience and the traditional customizer – with blocks and block patterns thrown in. In other words the best of the old and the new.
If you have just created a brand new site, don’t edit these pages – delete them instead and start afresh – or spend a little time familiarising yourself with what is possible, the different post types, and examples of block arrangements or layouts and then delete them.
In our setup the default is to discourage search engines. This is to protect you from accidentally publishing your experimental doodles. In our experience many site owners can take many weeks, months, sometimes years to begin work and then finish their site.
For your sanity we recommend you make sure you visit the settings page Dashboard > Settings > Reading and scroll to the bottom, where you will see the options available.
Whilst it is up to the discretion of search engines to respect the discourage notice, the main ones do. If they find your page they will display a notice that robots.txt has denied them access. If your site has mission critical information that must not be made public i.e. is embargoed you should tighten the options to the users of the website only or to admins only.
Once your site is live – search engines will start to add pages to the index
Rookie errors:-
Coming soon pages that never come anytime soon – good idea if part of a concerted plan to go live and you need to build a bit of momentum, collect email addresses etc
Under construction pages – this is very 1990s – the modern website allows you to make everything draft – better not to publish at all or the search engine will remember your old content for much longer than is ever desirable
Forgetting to change the discourage search engines notice for months and months thereby letting the search engine forget about you entirely …
Forgetting to delete the placeholder content … images, pages and posts will be viewable and confuse your audience
Widgets are blocks that appear outside the content area or a page or post. They include sidebars and footers and in some templates may include multiple positions in the header and above or below it.
Footers are useful for boring but essential items like a reminder of the legals, privacy, poilcies, social links, basically the who the hell you are guff, how to get in touch and your address if it is relevant (if you are a trading body, incorporated as a business or charity this is essential). In some websites they will contain a so called call to action, to sign up to a newsletter or join or donate. They are powerful because they appear on all pages including post pages, so important stuff doesn’t have to be repeated.
As with menus, there is a freestanding view which we have re-enabled as this has been withdrawn in recent updates an a customizer view. In the latter you just click on the desired element and it will appear below in the selected position (the footer in the example).
The customizer widget view
To move elements around you simply drag and drop them. In the customizer remember to Publish your changes. In the non preview mode remember to click Done or Save, as appropriate.
Manage widgets without preview
Rookie errors:-
Adding the same footer content to the bottom of your page or post, when you can do the very same thing with the footer widget once
Using the backspace to go back to the previous page – annoyingly you will lose your edits!
Leaving default widgets on your website with the placeholder content possibly advertising someone else’s creative business
