Using Your WordPress Content Management System

Here are the most frequently asked about topics when learning to manage your web site with your new WordPress Content Management system.

When logging into your WordPress admin the log in url will be yourdomainname.com/wp-admin

Tips: If you forgot your username or password there is a link right there on the log in page to retrieve it. After logging in, as an administrator when browsing through your web site, you will see a black admin bar at the top of your screen, this gives you quick access into quickly being able to choose edit from any page of the site.

After you log in, the first thing you will see is your dashboard, you can manage what you see on your dashboard by clicking on the tab in the upper right corner that says “screen options”

Looking over to your left you will see a list of links, the most common ones that you will use are:

  • Posts: this is where you add and edit blog posts for your blog page
  • Media: you can add images and documents like .psf’s here to use later in your pages and posts
  • Pages: this is where you add and edit your web site pages
  • Appearance > menus: this is where you control the appearance of your main navigation links and footer links
  • Appearance > widgets: typically here you can control your global sidebar content and blog sidebar content (most web sites that we create will have the option within your page when editing a page to add custom sidebar content and either show or hide the global sidebar)

To add or edit your admin users click on the users link in the left column. There you can add a new admin user by clicking on add new. Try to NOT use “admin” as the user name and remember to choose a very strong password, and at the bottom of the screen choose administrator as the user type.

Have an older version of WordPress that needs an update?

Do you see this when you log into your CMS?? WordPress 3.8.1 is available! Please update now.

Don’t do it yourself …Often times if you have a custom design or development customizations, preforming an upgrade/ or update to your cms can break things like your overall site layout! Without a proper back up attempting an upgrade can be devastating. Learn More »

To add a new page to your site its a two step process. First you create the page, then you add it to your navigation menu. To add a page, from your admin dashboard, choose pages from the links on the left, then choose add new.

Follow these steps to create your new page:

  1. Give your page a title
  2. Add your page content and images if you wish
  3. Select your layout (from the right panel you will see page template, most sites willl have 1,2 or full page layout.
  4. Most sites will use featured image for a unique page banner
  5. Then save your page and its ready to use

(click on the image below for a larger view)

page-cms

To add a video to a page of your web site we recommend using You Tube embed code.

To add the code onto a page you have to first log into your web site as an administrator, then follow these steps:

1. Go to Your Tube to the video you want to add to your page and click chare under the video, then choose embed then copy the code out. As shown below.
(Click image for a larger view)
LESSON 1- Hacker Protection - YouTube 2014-05-06 10-06-47
2. Then in your web site admin, choose the page you wish to add the video to and choose edit page.

3. Then switch the view to “Text” to paste the code into the html of the page as shown below.
(Click image for a larger view)

Add New Page ‹ Your Page Today — WordPress 2014-05-06 10-09-59

Then just save the page (choose publish for a new page, save if adding to an existing one) and whalla, the video is there.

menu1After you have created your site pages, you can add them to your main navigation bar by going to appearance and menus. Here you can drag and drop links to reorder them, you can add new links to the menu and remove them as well.

To add a new link to your menu, (see pink arrows just below to the left) choose the link page link you want to add from the left panel by checking the box next to the link, then choose add to menu.

menu2

If you arrange a link indented (see pink arrow just above to the right) under another link it will become a sub page and fly out as a sub link.

To remove a link choose the arrow to the right of the link (next to the work page) to expand open the link properties and choose remove. After making all of your changes make sure to you save the menu for the changes to take effect.

Under appearance > widgets is where you will typically find things such as footer elements, blog side bar content and your global sidebar, these can all be managed here. All web sites are developed a bit differently so you are unsure where something is, just ask us.

Here is the fun part, getting your pages optimized for search engine visibility. In page edit mode down toward the bottom (if we have it installed) you will see something called “all in one seo” this is where you add the meta data the search engines like Google look for when cashing in sites to their engine.

The meta title is considered to be the most important keyword phrase for that particular page … think of this when adding the meta title …would your ideal target audience enter this as a search term in Google to find your services, IF they don’t know your company name? Each page should have a unique page title.

The description is a couple sentences introducing what the page is about and should entice them to click in to view the page.

The keyword meta tag is not as importnat as the title meta tag in terms of important keywords, its ok to enter them but remember that Google will look at the title as being the most important key phrase for the page. Click here to learn more about optimizing pages

Google Analytics is a fantastic tool that is not only FREE but easy to install and use. This tool provides detailed statistics of your web site visitors, how they found you, with what key words, from where and even what pages they visited, and so much more. This is a fantastic tool to utilize if you want to see how your web site is performing, what are its weak points and strong points and build upon your web site in a manner that will yield better results over time. –Click here for step by step instructions to get Google Analytics set up on your site

Adding your blog posts is very similar to adding your pages … go to posts and choose add new, then add your title and content just like you would with pages. The difference with blog posts is that they will automatically appear on your site to your blog page, without having to add them within the menu system as individual pages.

You can also add categories that will appear in the side bar of your blog pages, this does a couple things, it adds keywords, and makes for easy user navigation as well.

You optimize the posts the same way as you optimize your pages. You can choose to publish your post, save it as a draft, in case you want to come back to it and finish up later (this will prevent it from going live but will save it within your admin under posts as a draft) and you can also choose a publication date, this comes in handy if you create for instance 5 posts and you want to schedule them to go live one at a time say once a week, and finally you can use featured image in posts to add your blog post images.

If you have contact forms developed into your site we typically use the “cforms” plugin, which can be managed via the cforms link to the left from your admin. When new entries come in we typically have them configured to appear on your dashbaord. If you cannt see new cforms entries on your dashboard all you have to do is select the “screen options” from the dashboard and make sure cforms entires is selected. For more information about how to edit your existing forms or add new ones give us a call as this can be a complicated process.

Have a Web Site Back Up Plan in Place? Did you know that over 30,000 websites get hacked into every day!? If you have web site on line, having a back up plan in place is critical to ensure that no matter what happens your web site and its files and data will remain intact. On a weekly or monthly basis (depending on how often you update your web site) we will create a full back up of your web site files and database. – Click here to learn more »