Help for Beginners
What are posts?
Posts are the lifeblood of a successful website. You can post news, articles or stories, or whatever in a blog, perfectly designed to engage and/or inform your audience. Posts are the lifeblood of any website, negelect to post and your website will lose traction. Keep your site alive by posting articles regularly, so your readers know you’re still there. Many themes from the WordPress stable support multiple post types, so you can choose to engage your audience using short text, quotes, images, video embeds etc. Activate the events plugin to create events as posts. Posts are syndicated on https://news.ourlocality.org. Your stories can be easily syndicated to another website or to your favourite social media. Events can optionally appear in your news stream, but won’t be syndicated so write a post to promote them.
What are pages?
Pages generally contain infrequently changing blurb about you or your organisation – e.g. Contact Us or About Us, but can also be very important pages like your front page or a special landing page. You can insert dynamic content into a page, such as your news stream and a lot lot more. Many of the things that feature on post types, like categories and tags, and date stamp, are missing on pages. However like posts they can support different page templates and can be useful in creating thematic areas for your content. Use pages to help you create an initial website structure, but remember that pages are not checked very frequently by search engines. Use posts not pages to update. 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.
What are categories?
Make similar articles easier to find by assigning posts to categories, at least one is mandatory, best not put all your articles in News. 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 may confuse, but judicious use can help you create a legible website structure.
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 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. If you don’t have your own originals, get snapping – stock images don’t work as well as your own! But if you are stuck, try Openverse, which has millions of reasonably high quality images to choose from which are copyright free with attribution, of course.
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). Enable comments 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 premium services (we do not benefit and we don’t normally recommend them). More themes are also available at <a href=”https://wordpress.org/themes”>wordpress.org</a>. Ask 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. We won’t upload any old theme, and definitely will not tolerate nulled themes, that is commercial themes that have been modified to work without a licence. We have been proposed this before and discovered they concealed a hidden payload. “Block” themes are highly recommended. If you want to build sites using full site editing (FSE) we have a selection of these templates too. FSE do not have many customizer settings, rather the settings are available in the new Site Editor very similar to the page builder – be aware that these templates are for designers with time.
Can I manage Menus?
Since WordPress 3.0 you can configure the menu links very flexibly, automatically of by hand. Page stubs can be created straight from the Customizer and links to categories, tags and external sites are possible. Many themes support a social menu and may offer a number of menu positions – margins and footers if supported. Menus can be placed in pages too, sometimes handy. FSE templates make menu management a little trickier.
What about the right or left hand column and the footer?
These are widget areas which can be configured to add static content, like images or dynamic content, like a list of recent posts or comments. Each theme supports a variety of widget positions, which will 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. In FSE templates these are managed in the page builder.
Are blocks enabled?
Blocks are the new layout system in WordPress, since version 5.0 (December 6, 2018). Blocks are flexible design elements, which are exactly like widgets, but can be placed anywhere in the content area. Blocks enable anyone with a bit of creative imagination to design good looking front pages or landing pages with a clear call to action.
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.
While most of the software we use is free, we pay for some like the registration side, SSL and naturally a server. Paying customers are necessary and donations also help us keep it free for those that really cannot afford to pay. If you receive free support an are feeling flush: https://ourlocality.org/donate/
