The How-To Guide to Managing Your New Website Cultivating Success: Making a Website Work for Your Farm Business

Logging Into WordPress: To log in to WordPress, just open any internet browser (the most common are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Explorer) – you’ll see one of these icons on the desktop:

Then type the name of your website followed by /wp-admin into the browser’s address bar at the top. For purposes of this tutorial we’ll use Diane’s website http://www.cobblestonecreekfarm.com as the example. You’ll need to log in to WordPress, the “back-end” of your site, whenever you want to make changes or add new articles or pictures to your site. Using Diane’s site as an example, you’d type http://www.cobblestonecreekfarm.com/wp-admin into the browser bar as shown below.

You’ll then be asked for your Username and Password. Type in the Username and Password we provided you and click Log In.

Navigating the Back End of Your Website:

This is how the backend of your site will look once you log in. The menu at the left contains all the items you’ll need to click on to visit various parts of your site and make changes. (You may see additional options or fewer options depending on which plugins you have enabled. However all the basic plugins that you need and that are described here will come preloaded on your site.) The options, labeled above, are as follows:

Dashboard/Home – This is the front screen you’ll see when you first log in to WordPress. It shows your recent activity and comments. You won’t need to do anything on this screen other than choose an option on the left menu.

Updates – This section shows when there are updates to your theme or plugin. I recommend updating whenever the option is available, but make sure to do a backup of your site first. More on that later in the Guide. Even if you don’t want to make changes to your website, you should login every once in a while just to check for updates.

Posts – This is where you’ll go to add articles or log entries.

Recipes – This is the WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin. You can visit this section to add new recipes to your site.

Media – This is where you add media files such as pictures, documents, or videos to your site.

Links – A part of the theme you most likely won’t need to use.

Pages – This is where you add pages will appear in your site’s top menu (Diane has chosen Our Farm, Who We Are, History, Our Products, Directions, Recipes, and Contact Us).

Comments – Visit this section to approve comments on your blog articles or recipes. If you’ve decided not to use these sections of the site, or you don’t want to allow comments, you won’t need this section. The comments are set not to show unless/until they’ve been approved by you to eliminate spam. Appearance – There are several options under appearance: Themes, Customize, Widgets, Menu, Header, Background, Theme Options, and Editor. We will cover these items in detail further on in this guidebook.

Plugins – Plugins are add-ons that you can add to your WordPress site to give it additional functionality. We will add 5 plugins to your website for you before you receive it: WordFence, Google Analytics Dashboard for WP, Updraft Plus, WP Ultimate Recipe, and MapPress. After we deliver your site, you have the option to add even more plugins to increase the functionality of your site

Users – This is the section of your website where you can add users or edit user information. You won’t need to do this unless you need to add another person who can access the back end of your site to edit it or you add functions through plugins that will allow customers to login to your site.

Tools – You most likely will not need to use this section of your site.

Settings – The settings section includes the following options: General, Reading, Writing, Discussion, Media, Permalinks, and Limit Login Attempts. We will explain this section in more detail later in the Guidebook.

MapPress – This is a plugin that will allow you to give your customers step by step directions to your farm.

WordFence – This plugin will remind you when there are updates that need to be made and send security alters if there are any issues or problems with your site.

Google Analytics Dashboard for WP – This plugin will show a graph with statistics in your WordPress dashboard (the yellow star above) for the number of people visiting your site and other stats. It will also allow you to see how many people visited each page in the pages section.

Note: You should not make changes in the areas of this menu that we don’t talk about in the rest of this manual (unless you know what you ‘re doing of course!) since even small inconsistencies in the code can break a site. Don’t worry too much though – we’ll walk you through the process of setting up a regular backup of your site and saving it to the cloud so you’ll always have a spare copy to revert back to incase of any problems with your site. We also have an emergency backup saved within your hosting panel that happens automatically. You can collapse this left menu on WordPress by clicking on the last option on the bottom. If you’ve accidentally collapsed the menu it will look like this:

Simply click on the bottom arrow where the yellow star is to open the menu again.

Updating Your Site: When you receive your website, it will be fully ready to be used. However, this does not mean you can’t make changes to your site. This manual will show you how to update your site after delivery should you want to change your logo, the colors etc. after your site is completed. You can also add pages and blog posts or change the settings. Let’s review updates you can make one at a time.

Changing the Logo and Site Name: To change the logo if you have an existing logo or to add a logo if you’re just using a website name in place of the logo, you will go to the Appearance menu and then select Customize:

When you select Customize you will see the screen on the following page. When you are in the appearance, customize section you will see all of your changes in test mode on the right side of the screen before you save them. So this is your chance to change the options and test how those changes will look. If you decide to save the changes, hit the blue Save button at the upper right of the menu. If you do not like the changes and you do not wish to save, hit the x and that will cancel any changes that you made.

To change the site title and tagline, click on Site Title & Tagline and type in new options. Your site title will show to the right of your logo. If you want to remove the site title or tagline and just use a logo, just delete what is in the site title or tagline field and hit save.

Changing the Site Colors You also have the option to change some of the website colors here by selecting Colors on the menu. The other colors can be changed under Appearance, Theme Options, Design and for the text colors Appearance, Theme Options, Typography. We will cover this later in the Guidebook.

Changing The Logo If you provided us with a logo but you’ve rebranded and have a new logo you can change that by going to the next menu option, Header Image. The recommended size for your header image is 392 by 96 pixels but you can try an image of another size to see how it looks. You will also have the option to revert back to past header images in addition to uploading a new one. Remember to hit save to save your new header and make it permanent on the website.

Changing the Website Background When we deliver the website to you it will have a background color. For example, Diane’s website (http://www.cobblestonecreekfarm.com) uses this green rice paper on the following page. But you can change your website background at any time. If you use the tile option, the background will repeat to fill up the page. Make sure you have a tileable image that will not show gridlines if you do that – not using a tileable image would be distracting. Alternatively, you can use a large picture and not tile it by

selecting No Repeat again as long as it is something that will fade into the background and not be too distracting. You want the content of your website to be the most prominent thing!

You can also select left center or right for your photo. If you’ll be using a tiled image, select left. If you’re using a non-tiled image such as a large photograph, select center. Make sure the image is large enough to fill up both the right and left of the site all the way down to the bottom.

Here are some options for rice paper colors: http://1-art.eu/images/backgrounds/ricepaper/ricepaper.htm. You can find more options for backgrounds online, just make sure you have permission to use the background you choose for commercial use on your website.

Widgets The next option within Appearance, Customize is Widgets. You probably won’t need to change the widgets but it is an option. The widgets are different places where you can put content on the website. You can create text widgets or widgets with things like recent posts, links, calendar, recent comments etc. Here are the places where you can add widgets:

Your website will come with widgets already set up in the footer for your tag cloud, contact us, and recent posts. We suggest leaving the widgets as they are but you can add additional widgets if needed.

Changing the Front Page and Posts Page Lastly you have the option under Appearance, Customize to change what pages show as your front page and your blog or posts page. These will already be selected based on your answers on the form, but should you wish to change what shows as your front page or add a blog when you did not have one before you can change them here.

Adding Blog Posts It is important to add content regularly to your website. This can be new images, recipes, updates or even blog posts. To add a blog post, click on Posts as shown by the gold star on the following page and then go to “add new.” Then select a title and fill in your blog information. To add images to your blog posts, click on add media as shown below then click “Upload Files.” You can also click on the starred “text” on the right to get the html codes for that page of your website. We don’t recommend editing the code unless you know what you are doing.

Adding Recipes To add recipes you will click on Recipies and then “add new” and then fill in all the fields shown on the next page. You can also “tag” your recipe with a particular search term to separate the recipes by season, ingredient, or category or use the “cuisines” and “courses” fields. Select a featured image if you want to show a picture of your recipe.

Backing Up Your Website Updraft Plus is the plugin we recommend to use for backing up your website. Backing up your site on a regular basis and saving a copy to remote storage will ensure that you don’t lose your website should your website crash or be hacked, which does happen occassionally. If you are prepared, the most recent backup copy of your site can be uploaded and your site restored – if not, you may lose your entire site and have to start from scratch. To backup your site, go to settings, then Updraft Plus Backups.

Normally then you’ll click Backup Now as shown on the page below. The first time you use the plugin though, you’ll need to set your settings to allow each backup to automatically save to remote storage. There are several options but the easiest to use is Dropbox and you can create a free account at Dropbox.com.

To setup your settings the first time you use the plugin, go to the settings tab and adjust your settings as desired. We recommend taking a weekly backup and retaining at least two copies.

Then sync your remote storage account (set one up at dropbox.com if you don’t have one already) by following the instructions under Copying Your Backup to Remote Storage below that. Email is not a good option because the files are so large they may not transmit properly.

Updating Themes and Plugins and WordPress to New Versions It’s a good idea to regularly update your plugins and themes and your WordPress installation. Updates come out whenever there is a security concern that needs to be blocked or on a regular basis to improve functionality. Before updating your plugins you will want to backup your website using updraft plus (or any other method) using the previous step. It is possible (but not likely) that an update could crash your site so please do not skip that important step. Keeping old versions will leave your website vulnerable to attack and being buggy. To update your site click on updates under the Dashboard menu.

Once you click on Updates you will see what updates are available. See the next page for an example. You’ll need to update WordPress separately if a WP update is available and then check all of the plugin updates and then “update plugins” and then check all the updates and “update themes.” Stars are shows on each place you need to click on the following page.

Approving Comments On each blog post, recipe etc. you’ll need to select whether or not to allow comments. If you allow comments, you should select to have to approve them before they can be shown. Sometimes people will place spam comments for approval so you’ll want a chance to deny these if you choose to even use comments on your site. Under posts, click on quick edit and then uncheck allow comments on any posts you do not wish to allow people to comment on.

If you do choose to allow comments on any posts, you’ll need to approve them. They’ll show in red if there are any “pending comments” waiting for your approval.

Once you click on comments, you’ll need to check each individual comment and then approve or move them to the trash (i.e. deny) them as shown on the following page. If you click on author and then bulk actions you can deny or approve all of the comments at once.

Changing Reading, Writing, and Typography Settings You can change the overall settings for your website under Appearance, Theme Options. On the first screen you will see a place to add your farm/business social media accounts. The blank ones will not show but anything you fill in will show as a link like the picture below in the upper righthand corner of your site. Remember to update your links if you change your accounts!

At the bottom of the general settings are the options for the copyright and credits at the bottom of your site.

The copyright will be set to the current year and your current blog name. You can change this if desired. You can uncheck the credit links if you do not wish to show that your site was designed on WordPress in the lower right corner of your site. Here’s an example of the bottom of a site with the credits and copyright notice:

By clicking on the other tabs under Appearance, Theme Options, you can also change your website’s fonts and colors.

We don’t recommend changing anything under the “layout” or “SEO” tabs but you can play around with the settings in the other tabs here to change your fonts and colors as long as you take a backup beforehand. If needed you can always revert to an earlier backup of your site by going to Settings, UpdraftPlus Backups and then Restore as shown below.

Restoring a Website Backup

We hope this guide has been helpful! For any questions about the guide, please contact Galena at the Federation office by emailing [email protected]. Please be aware that we do not provide ongoing tech support or editing support for your website so you will need to consult this guide and do it yourself or contact a professional if you need ongoing maintenance support. We have paid for your first year of hosting and your domain name. We will contact you with a bill when it is time to renew and pay for the second year. Remember, the best websites are regularly updated, and maintained! Thanks and we hope you enjoy your new site!!