Webmaster’s Notes

Birmingham School of Bell Ringing

This site was built in Wordpress, using the Edin theme, chosen becuase it provides a simple way of displaying pages in GRIDS.

The HOME page (the default when you visit www.birminghambells.com) is Welcome and could be changed via Dashboard->Customise->Front Page

The WELCOME page is a PARENT page built using the GRID theme and because of this, all its child pages will automatically be displayed in a grid below the page’s content. The order of display is controlled by the page’s “order” number which is accessed by asking for “quick edit” on the ALL PAGES page.

The grid will show each page’s “featured image” if it has one. Otherwise just the first section of the text.

The structure of the parent-child relationships at the time of writing is quite simple:

Welcome->

  1. About the School
  2. Learning to Ring
  3. Towers
  4. News

The remaining pages are all stand-alone.

The MAIN MENU can be changed by visiting the Dashboard->Appearance->Menus page. Most of the items on the menu lead to PAGEs but some lead to LINKS (pages other than ones on this site) or CATEGORIES (shows the user a bunch of POSTS, or news items, in a specific category).

The CATEGORIES on this site so far are very simple – the only one is NEWS. This should be ticked for each new news POST as it is created. Once an item is out of date it can be un-ticked and then it will sink geacefully out of sight …. but can still be found by using the SEARCH BUTTON or the Archive.

The other things that look like menus actually are widgets. The EDIN theme allows for widgets in many different positions on the page… experiment! VISIBILITY can be useful as the website grows – a widget may be visible from every page or just from some of them…. beware if a page is FULL WIDTH then the SIDEBAR area is not displayed.

A small and new website doesn’t need an archive, really, but soon it will be necessary. WordPress quietly creates one for you month by month, and the button to see it is currently in the FOOTER area of the widgets page. You can move it around if you like….

Also in the footer are a hit counter and a FOLLOW option which will allow people to sign up for instant updates, ie an email every time a new POST is created. Most people usually prefer a weekly email. But it’s useful for some.

If you want to EDIT a post or a page you can ask for the EDIT option when you are sitting on the page.

SHARING posts is very important if you want lots of people to read them. Over most of this site, sharing is enabled, so people can quickly advertise your content on Facebook, twitter, email, or print it out. If you want to email a summary of recent news then the easiest way is to visit this specially made page of the site.. By the way this list is an example of a WIDGET that only shows up on one page because of its VISIBILITY settings.

People like watching YOUTUBE VIDEOS and they are easy to embed on this site in pages or posts. the video below was embedded by viewing it on Youtube, clicking the SHARE icon below the video (it looks like a twiglet) and asking for EMBED.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Jp638z8SEs&w=420&h=315]

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