Yesterday we re-introduced you to Pages, and how to enter basic content on your WordPress site. Today we will look at the additional tools you can use to build beautiful pages throughout your site.
Your page content and format is the main way you will distinguish your pages from others on the internet, and even others within your website.
Extra Tools:
WordPress has some additional tools built into their sites, as well as Worship Times plug-ins that can help you create a great page.
With the ‘Add Media’ tool, you can not only add individual pictures, picture galleries, video or pdf documents from your Media Library, but upload pictures from your computer, and more. You can add event lists from the Event Manager, and embed videos, calendars and social media content directly from other websites and platforms:
Other tools are available to help you add forms and picture sliders you have created in your site as well as maps, location addresses and office hours. Explore these tools, and see all the things they can do as you make your pages unique and welcoming to your website visitors.
Helpful Hint: We recommend adding and editing your text content before adding in media, forms, maps, etc., for ease of editing.
Visual vs. Text
You may notice as you’re editing that you are editing in the Visual editor of the content box:
What is the text editor, and do you need to worry about it? The text editor displays code that assists in building your page. You will almost never need to look at or worry about that tab in your content box. BUT, you might accidentally click on it and see a bunch of code. You can always click back over to the Visual tab, and see the view you are used to.
One more note on the content box: Because the fonts and font styles are unique to your theme, the layout of the content box will not look exactly like the actual page. If you look at the actual page, and want to move text or pictures, or change headers size or styles, you can always go back into the page’s editor and make those changes quickly.
Screen Options
You will notice that there are other boxes with options for your page. For most pages, you will not need to do anything with these options, but we will introduce you to them briefly. If you can’t see some of the available tools, you can find them in the screen options for the editing section, and choose which sections you want to see or hide:
Page Attributes:
There are two main options within Page Attributes that you will use. Parent pages indicate whether the page you are creating is a “child” page to another page in the site. For instance, you might have a main ministry page, and list pages for specific ministries as child pages.
Example: “About Us” would be a parent page. “Our Staff” would be a child page of “About Us”
Templates determine the type of page that will appear to your site’s visitors. You can create blog, blog archive and landing pages as well as the typical pages that will make up most of your site’s content. The best way to see what each template looks like is to test them out.
Page Layout:
With the page layout settings, you can easily change the look of a page. For most themes, the options are a right sidebar, a left sidebar or no sidebar. Some themes have more layout options. You can use these options as it makes sense in different parts of your site.
Featured Image:
Featured images can be added to pages you intend to use as featured pages in a widget section on your home page, landing page or in a sidebar.
Yoast SEO:
SEO, “search engine optimization,” is how your site and individual pages and posts within your site show up in search engines. We will address this further in a future post, but we encourage you to spend some time learning about SEO, and how this plug-in can optimize your site’s search appearances. There are some great posts on SEO on the internet, and you can explore the Yoast plug-in on your own to discover some of its tools, as well.
Next Steps:
Have fun! If you haven’t spent much time exploring the tools in your WordPress Pages section, try them out! Create a test page, and play around with adding different types of content, editing, different headers, page templates and layouts. Plot out a potential content layout, and enjoy the creative options.
*Most blogs on WordPress-based sites utilize ‘Posts’ rather than ‘Pages.’ Look for future information on Posts, why you use them to build a blog, and other uses for Posts.
