Login
You will go here to login: https://www.suecarl.hamwebs.com/wp-admin [* will be https://www.suecarlson.net/wp-admin when site is live ] using your username (sue) and password. If you forget your password you can click “Lost your password?” to get an email to re-set it.
The login will open a dashboard where the options you need to update the site content are all in a black sidebar on the left. When you are logged in you (and only you) will also see a black toolbar at the top of every page and post in your live site, with links enabling you to edit pages and posts or create new pages and posts. The links to pages will only open the top-level (parent) page you are looking at, so if you on an index page that includes content from child-pages or multiples posts, you will need to use “edit” links in the page itself (if they are available) or find the individual child-pages or posts via the dashboard.
DASHBOARD
Briefly (more details follow), you’ll be using:
Posts to write new articles for the STUDIO section (or edit existing posts).
Work to edit or add artworks
Publications to edit or add a page about a publication (eg Ice, Paint, Memory)
Pages to edit the content of all the other pages
Media to add images, audio files and pdfs (particularly if uploading in large batches)
Image ALT Text to add or edit SEO-friendly descriptions for images
Artwork Data to add or edit the media, dimensions, year & price data for your artworks
SEO Entry to add or edit search-engine-optimized page-titles and meta descriptions for each page or post.
Within any Dashboard section, there are multiple ways of filtering the items in the list and there is always “search” if there is one particular item you want to find and you know the title.
There is also a tab at the very top of the window for “Screen Options” and here you will find options such as changing the number of items per page in the list.
On a single post or page, if you make an edit that loses some important content, you can also open the “Screen Options” via a tab at the very top of the dashboard for that page and display “Revisions”—from which you can select an older version of your content to revert to.
ADDING NEW “POSTS” for the STUDIO SECTION
Click “Add New” under Posts and enter title and text, using the formatting tools available to add sub-headers (use Heading 4) to break up the articles, use bold, italics, add links etc. You can also add images to posts using the “Add Media” link. Generally the “Visual” editor is all you need.
The “Text” editor tab can be useful if you want to add html for a special reason. You can view the post in preview mode via a link in the black toolbar at the top of the page (which will remain over your public site while you are logged in and will allow you to edit any post or page from the page itself). You can save the post in draft mode until it is ready to publish. Click “Publish” when you are ready to publish the post to live.
ADDING NEW “WORKS”
The records for your artworks are created with a custom post-type called “Works”
You can create a new artwork record from the live site (public-facing page) when you are logged in by using the “New > Work” link from the black toolbar at the top of the page. Make sure the kind of post you have selected is “Work” as the different kinds of posts are set up differently.
Add the main, regular-sized image (preferably ≤200kb) using the “Set featured image” link.
If you wish to provide a larger image for the enlargement option, add that image via the “Enlarged Image > Add Image” link (not all images will need this as much as the ones with very subtle detail).
If you wish your new image to be the representative image for the year to which the image belongs, check the “Use this featured image to represent year” checkbox. As long as this image is not below the currently-checked image for the year, it will override a former selection and become the new representative image. If by chance you want to use an image that is further down the list than the one previously chosen, go to the existing representative image an uncheck the checkbox there (and “update”).
Give your artwork its title as you create the record so that the url that is generated for the record reflects the name (before you click “publish”). If you don’t do this, the system will generate a url based on the record’s unique ID—which isn’t terrible, but it’s preferable to have a descriptive url for easier identification.
Check the category to which your artwork belongs (paintings, works on paper, etc)
Complete all of the “Artwork Data” that you want to be displayed for the work (year, media, dimensions, price). Other than the YEAR field (which is needed to add the artwork to the portfolio for that year) leaving fields empty will not cause a problem.
You can edit the Yoast SEO data on each page as you go through (more about SEO further down) or you can do this via the “SEO Entry” page available via the dashboard sidebar later on. SEO descriptions do not show on your live pages but are useful to help people find your work via search engines.
When you are ready to click “Publish” edit the year of the publication date to match the year the work was made. This will make it easier to find work in a given year if you need to do this sometimes (eg for manual re-ordering—though editing the dates even further by day/month/year is another way of getting the images into the right order).
NB an alternate way to add a batch of new artworks is to upload all the new images into the media library (open the media library and drag them all in at once) and then navigate to the media library to find each image as you are creating new artwork records. This can be a faster process if you are uploading a lot of new images at once—though it would be best to only upload the smaller images (suitable for “Featured Image”) this way and to manually add the larger images for the enlargements record by record later.
ADDING NEW “PUBLICATIONS” POSTS
The records for your publication pages are created with a custom post-type called “Publications”
You can create a new publication record from the live site when you are logged in by using the “New > Publication” link. Make sure the kind of post you have selected is “Publication” as the different kinds of posts are set up differently.
Add the main, regular-sized image using the “Set Featured Image” link (≤550px wide is a good size guide here, as this will be used for the thumbnail/representative image for the post in the index page and you won’t need an image larger than this).
Add the title for the publication.
Enter text in the main text field.
You can either add images within the body of the text individually (using the add media link, browsing to the image in media library or from your computer and using the WordPress options for choosing the correct size and alignment for your image) or, if you would like to add a slideshow of images (as in “Ice, Paint, Memory” you need to use the “Add Media” link but instead of the default method of adding one image at a time, choose the “Create Gallery” method via the link in the left sidebar that opens and add multiple images. The images will display in the edit page differently to the way they will display on the live page but if you have added them via “Create Gallery” they will display as a slideshow on the live site (in the publication pages).
If you need to edit a slideshow gallery, click on the topmost image and you will see a little pencil (edit) icon and an X (delete). Do not click the X to delete an individual image; clicking this will delete the gallery. Instead, click the pencil icon to edit the gallery (to add or delete individual images). When the gallery opens in edit mode, you will see that you can delete images from the gallery via an “X” on each image and you can add additional images via the “Add to Gallery” link on the left. You can also re-arrange the order of the images via drag/drop.
Once you have finished making changes, (i) click “Update Gallery” and (ii) then, back in the publication page, click “Update” on the page itself.
You can add the SEO descriptions in the Yoast fields here or later via the dashboard “SEO Entry” link.
When you are ready to publish, edit the publication date to reflect the date of the publication itself. This will put the posts in the right order without need for manual re-arranging.
EDITING THE PAGES
Home
When you are logged in, you can use the “Edit Page” link in the black toolbar at the top of the page to open this page in edit mode.
This is where you will edit the featured image for the page content. You can remove the image using the “Remove Featured Image” link and use the “Set Featured Image” link that then replaces it to select a new image—either from the media library or from your computer.
Remember to click “update” to save your changes.
About
When you are logged in, you can use the “Edit Page” link in the black toolbar at the top of the page to open this page in edit mode and make changes to the featured image and/or to the text.
Contact
There is not be much here to edit unless you move but this is another page where there are a few html details that you can watch out for in the Text editor if you need to edit it.
Preparing Images for your Website:
Please ask your photographer to supply you with:
(i) a jpeg that is 1500px high and between 100-400kb (for the “Featured” images)
(ii) a jpeg that is higher resolution suitable for the “Enlargements” (it doesn’t matter so much what size this is, as it’ll only be people who really want to see the detail who will click to see this one and they are less likely to mind the download time—though if your photographer were to give you a 1MB copy and a larger one, you might choose to use the 1MB one).
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION WORK
Search engines rely heavily on the texts on your pages to determine whether or not your content is likely to be of interest to someone who has entered a particular search. Text that is styled as a header will be understood by search engines to be particularly important and phrases that occur with frequency will also be understood to be particularly important.
Wherever your website includes texts, it is worth looking at the text you have on the page to see if it includes phrases that someone who’d be interested in the page content might actually type into a search.
In addition to the on-page text (and especially if your pages are image-heavy, text-light), you should use the options for search engine optimization that allow you to add descriptions that don’t show on the pages themselves. This will make your site significantly more effective if you do it well.* These are as follows:
Image ALT Text
Here you should describe your images in a way that both describes the image content and is also a good additional hint for search engines about what the page content is about (use phrases that people are likely to put into search engines). This content can be entered image-by-image when you upload an image or by opening images in the media library (see Media tab in the dashboard to view all images). For all images that have been used as “featured” images you can add/edit the image alt text via a link in the dashboard sidebar.
SEO Title and Meta Description
Neither of these is visible on the page itself but they provide the content for search engines to understand your pages and the title and probably also the meta description will show up in the search results in search engines. This can also be done page by page (in the Yoast SEO section; delete the default texts that are there and replace with more targeted phrases) but it can be easier to work from a list-page like the one available via the “SEO Entry” link in the dashboard sidebar. You can open the page or post by clicking on the title to copy/paste a bit of the text to use for the meta-description.
* Understanding how to really work the SEO for your site involves quite a learning curve. If you don’t feel confident handling this yourself or don’t know how to use Google Analytics to measure the success of your efforts, you can contact rhm@hamwebs.com for help.