This template is a ‘Magazine’ format – as we are just starting out we don’t as yet have any  clearly defined ‘Sections’ or ‘Categories’ (I’ve made up a ‘Hut’ & ‘Douglas Park’ as a start) but we can make these up as we go along…

We can make it jump through hoops once I’ve got a basic grasp to the flow and subject matter and amount of your content.

 

Most of the News & Updates will be in the form of “Posts” – (See Left Hand menu)

You will need to

  1. Have a (fairly) short Descriptive Title for your article / update
  2. Text & possibly photos for the main body of the article
  3. A Featured Image (hopefully) This is the image that is shown at the top of each Post and can be a static image (OR a link to a youtube video = Featured Video) –
    These are a fixed size of 700 pixels Wide by 357 pixels Tall.  It’s best to have these sized BEFORE uploading tho the software will have a go at resizing the image to fit in all the various location and size options.

The Feature Image is fairly important to the glossy ‘Magazine’ look n feel of the template so it would be nice to be fairly consistent in it’s use through out… It may be you’ll want to post D&G Council news in which case we can create a standard council logo for use in these articles / category

SETUP

We can set the template up to do the bulk of the layout once we’ve got a clear view of the type of content – so you may want to use the ‘Screen Options’ at the Top Right of this screen to remove some of the clutter from the posts page (Most pages have the option to set the content and your computer will remember the settings)

For example below would be a typical Edit screen in the ‘Posts’ add / edit page

In the RH column on the Add / Edit page
Featured Video ( A YouTube Link perhaps?)
Featured Image – resized to 700 x 357 pixels for posts
Format – Normally set to “Standard”
Categories: Used to Group articles / items / updates by um… Category…   General News / The Hut /
You can add a new Category as you see fit – (Although we may need to manually update the site navigation / menu to include the new section as we still building the site)
Just email me info@kirkmoor.com
We’ll also be using the WordPress SEO by Yoast and Excerpt sections to tweak the articles.
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SEO means Search Engine Optimisation – Which is basically making it look good for Google.
At the top you of the Yoast SEO section you should see the Snippet Previw
(click the wee black triangle on the right if you can’t see it)
This is what the article will look like on a Google search results list. 6 times out of 10 the software will make a reasonable job of putting it together but we can give it a quick tweak to add ‘polish’
Meta Description
Normally the software will grab the first 156 characters of the text which means that sometime it will stop in mid sente….    You can either cut n paste the first couple of lines into the “Meta Description” box below and edit to suit (99 times out of 100) OR make up a couple of lines that describes the content of the page better.
SEO Title If your article has a long Title it may flag up as ‘Too Long’ in the SEO Title box – In which case type in a shorter one.
The SEO Preview should update as you go so you can see what it will look like on Google.

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Excerpt

This is just the short description of the article used in the side bar / list page etc. and is basically the same as the description in that it will use the first few lines of the content unless you specifically change it to make it a) the right length and b) better