The Frodsham and District round-table web site shows up coming events and promotions and attempts to attract new members as well as being a source of up to date information for existing members.It is all our responsibilities to maintain it especially the media and pr council member. Councillors are responsible for there own pages and events. Each council position has a page as does each and every member.

The web site is located at http://www.frodshamroundtable.co.uk. Log in using the members login link at the top.

The site is built on the popular and user friendly blogging platform Word-Press. This means there is a wealth of information about editing pages, posts modifying appearances and a whole host of plug-ins available. These extras are generally for the availability of the web master.

Log in by entering your issued user name and password. Ensure you keep your password strong by including upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols like $ or %. Make sure your password is more than 10 characters long.

If you forgot your password mechanisms for resetting are available through the “Lost Password Link”

Once you have logged in you are presented with the Dashboard screen. This shows the status of the site.

There are several concepts that need to be understood here.

Posts: These a blog entries, events planned, new reports, members and councillors pages and listings. Add a new post with the “add new” menu entries. The number of posts can be (and should be) quite large.

Each post is categorised into one or more Categories. The categories menu allows you to see current categories. Normally new categories would not be added. If they are they will appear on the menu and therefore unless you want a new top level menu, categories should list there parent (what sub category they are a member of).

Media: These are pictures and videos. They can be included in posts or they can just be as a result of a library of images available for the future. As a rule sensible names and titles should be added so they can be searched and easily found. Details of adding new pictures for posts are described later.

Links: Links are a list of URLs that can be references on a blog roll as access to other sites. We are not using them on this site.

Pages: These are different from posts and are generally static pages for specific purposes. Generally we are not using them here.

Comments: Comments are currently turned off, but when on will permit visitors to comments on posts. These can be restricted to just people with passwords (i.e. round table members).

Appearance, Plug-ins, Users, Tools and Settings are functions for the site administrators (web master) only. Please don’t use or alter anything here.

To edit a post, click the posts menu and then find the post you are interested in either by paging though all the posts, filtering by category or using the search box provided.

When you move your mouse over a post, options will appear permitting you to modify or re-categorise the post. This example we are fleshing out a post and changing pictures and the date of the event.

Click the edit link to change the post as shown.

Editing the post is normally achieved in Visual mode, meaning you can more or less see what the end results will look like. You can copy from a word document or type in directly. The default styles should always be used for headings. Heading level two should really be used in the post as the title entered will always be heading level 1 and you will have 2 large titles if you use heading level one again.

Select the categories from the menu at the side.

The meaning of the buttons on the menu can be easily discovered by holding you mouse over and waiting for the tool tip. Mark a selection of text if you are wanting to change its type or make it bold. Spell checking is on by default, look for any words highlighted with a wiggly underline for spelling errors.

One of the features of the Frodsham Round Table web site is the calendar that can show up coming events. If the event is the next one it will be automatically featured on the front page and the calendar permits the visitor to explore other past and future events.

This is driven by a custom field. Select the custom field from the drop down list and enter the date value in the format yyyy/mm/dd. Eg if the event date is 15 October 2010, enter 2010/10/15. These can also be changed by editing the field and pressing the update button (as shown).

Posts should be tagged so they can appear in the tag cloud and similar posts can easily be found. If no appropriate tags are lists feel free to add new ones.

Links in post should not be entered but the description of the link should be highlighted (as shown) and the link button (link in the chain) pressed. This will bring up the link dialog.

Enter the link URL and always select the target as open link in new window if the page is on another site. This is to avoid losing traffic from our web site.

Pictures and images add interest and value to a post. They break up the writing and make the post more readable. Often no appropriate image is available in the media library (but you can always check) so one option is to obtain an image from another site (if the site permits it – check licensing).

Select and right click to save the image to your computer. Give it a sensible name. Try to only save and upload files with the extension jpg, png and gif.

You can select more than one file at once with your mouse or by holding down the shift or caps button (windows only).

Once each image has finished uploading make sure you enter a title and alternate text which says what the image is. If appropriate a description can be added.

This upload and media pages can be added via the media library on the dashboard and these files can be managed and maintained from there too.

Usually you will want this image to be used in a post, select the position of the image and its size and click the button to add it.

Each post will usually have a featured image as well. This is used one in a summary of the post and can be in the post or not, your choice.

Images can be re-sized in the post by clicking on them and there attributes can be altered. It is nice to select images to resize to full size when selected. Images can be moved by dragging and dropping to being anchored to a certain point.

Once your text is complete, the finished article should look like the example shown here.

Make sure you save and this is done with the publish button or save to draft button. You can also schedule the page to be visible on the site only after a certin date by publishing to draft and then editing the publishing date.

Always spell check and preview your work to make sure you are happy with it. Once saved a button called View Post or Preview post will be available. Right clicking on this and showing it in a new window is a nice way so check your work and still make additional tweaks if required.

Here is the finished article.