How to use round table web site
Frodsham round table web site is written on a popular blogging platform called WordPress.
Customisations
This site is customized in a number of ways for Frodsham and district round table.
Home page – shows next up coming event
Events – Show all future events in date sequence
Past events – Show past events with most recent at top.
Event calendar – highlight which events are upcoming.
Search – implement decent system wide searching.
Twitter feed – show recent tweets.
Custom theme to look like national table site but css3 / HTML5 compliant and degrade nicely for older (or crap) browsers.
Upgrade advice / nag if running ie6 or below (insecure).
Content is King
The key to any web site is content, content is king. Word press makes it really easy for any one to add content but please remember the basic rules.
- Original quality content? Don’t copy or plagiarise.
- A good quality picture adds value. Ensure it is scaled before you up load it to max width 600px or max height 600 pixels. A free graphics application to do this is picasa for windows, or gimp for Tim and Linux users. If you don’t have one check creative common licensed flickr.com. And give the creator credit.
- Categorise your post. But don’t created new categorises unless really needed for significant content and then try to limit to Sub categories (ok in moderation).
- Do record events with the custom field event_date in yyyy/mm/dd format and ensure categorised as an event.
- Don’t include links to other sites in posts unless you have to. It is more professional and looks a whole lot better if you can embed into our site. We don’t want to drive people away, we want to keep them on our site. On google maps and you tube this is easily achieved with the embed button or link to buttons where google (who also own you tube) provide a snip-it of script you can cut (ctrl-c) and paste (ctrl-v) into the post. Just remember to use the HTML not visual mode when pasting (ctrl-v).
Concepts
Whilst word press is really easy to use it does need some basic concepts understood.
Posts
Posts or blog posts are categorized and have a date. They typically associate a tag which help it be found. Examples are news articles, events and discussions appropriate to a topic like firework displays.
Pages.
Pages do not have categorises or tags and have no concept of date. Examples are the home page and the about page.
I have customised event posts to have and event date. The needs to be added on each event in the custom field to show on the calendar and to be listed on the event / past event pages in date order. As soon as an event date is past the event will mover from the events page to the past events page. The home page shows the next up coming event using this custom meta data field so it is very important it.
Note to make things fast and work properly dates must be entered year first in the event date field. Ie yyyy/mm/dd
Therefore 2nd April 2009 would be 2009/04/02.
If you have not had a user name and password provided please the web master.
Login
You can log into the site, simply by clicking the members button on the top right of every page. Please change your pass-phrase and make it something long and secure. Make sure you include special characters like &^%$£”*&^, numbers and make it at least 10 characters long.
Once you have logged in you can use the Dashboard and write a new post or either other peoples. You can also comment on certain posts which if you want to make a comment you are welcome to do. Please don’t deface any pages or posts but feel free to add or correct them. This is public and needs to be kept presentable, after all children can see it.
For more help try these links
