There are certain practices that we recommend you follow to keep your school’s website at optimum condition and there are other practices that are required for you follow to ensure your website functions properly and follows district-mandated standards. Please read through these topics.
Mandatory Practices:
Proper Image Sizes: When uploading an image for use on your website, make sure that it is the correct size for what you want to use it for. For example, an image that you want to use for the Rotating Banner MUST be 850px by 450px or the Rotating Banner will change sizes. We recommend using an image-editing software to resize or crop any images you want to upload to their correct size. For a full list of proper image sizes, please refer to this page.
Top Level Menu Order: We have implemented standard top-level menus in order to help various users of the site (students, parents, staff, admin) to be able to move from one school site to another and quickly know where to find information. Some pages also require being in a certain position to function properly, like the Photo Gallery, Contact / Directions, etc. These are called ‘Display Pages’. If you wish to remove a pre-existing page from you site, set it to Draft, do not delete it. For the Top-Level Menu Items (e.g. Our School, News & Events, etc.), do not change their Title, or Order Number.
Do Not Move or Delete Display Pages: The following pages must not be moved from their menu position or they will not function: News, Newsletter, Announcements, Calendar, Events Listing, Photo Gallery, or Contact / Directions. If you wish to not use one of these, do not delete them, set them to Draft.
Top Level Menu Items Link to First Item in Menu: Each Top-Level Menu Item (e.g. Our School, News & Events, etc.) must link to the first listed item in its menu. See Example 1 for more information. You can change what page a Top-Level Menu Item links to by editing it, and scrolling down to the “Page Links To” section. Always insure that it is the first one in the menu. You can avoid having a page appear as the first in the list by changing the page’s “Order” number to anything except 0 or 1.
Example 1
TablePress: Your WordPress website has a Content Type entitled “TablePress” that governs all of the tables contained in the website. If you are planning on using a table, use this content type; do not copy and paste a table from a Word Document, PDF or the like. For more on using TablePress, please refer to this section of the Guide.
No Blank Landing Pages: The page that a Top Level Menu Item links to (it’s landing page) must not be blank.
Mandatory Widgets: The two mandatory widgets are the Rotating Banner, and Quick Links. However, if too many widgets are disabled, it may throw the balance of your homepage off.
Recommended Practices:
Balanced Homepage Layout: We recommend that the layout of your homepage should be balanced. If too many homepage widgets are disabled, the left sidebar can become short, and can make your homepage look unbalanced. Widgets can be enabled or disabled by contacting the Help Desk. The right sidebar can become too long as well if it contains a lot of text. The right sidebar text is populated by the page titled ‘Home’. If you feel that the middle column is lacking in content, you could contact the Help Desk to enable multiple Spotlights, a Video, the Principal’s Blog, etc. For more information on the Widgets that are available, please refer to the homepage of this site for a live demonstration, or the Widgets & Content Types Page.
Time-Sensitive Information: Using Content Types such as News, Newsletter, Spotlight, and Events for time-sensitive information is preferred. Pages that are created and displayed in the menus that contain time-sensitive information can become irrelevant, and clutter the menus up if they are not deleted.
Short Title Quick Links: Quick Links, which is the first section in the left sidebar on the homepage, contains commonly used links. This section can quickly become cluttered. The recommended practice is to keep the title of each Quick Link short, to ensure that it does not take up two lines.
Bookmark Dashboard: For convenience, you may want to bookmark your login/dashboard page. For example: http://yourschool.sd61.bc.ca/wp-admin. This way you can have your login credentials saved, and only need to click once to begin editing your website.
Content Integration: We recommend that you do your best to integrate any events or information normally contained in .PDF newsletters into your website’s content types. For example, one may be accustomed to only releasing a newsletter with important dates, but those dates should be entered as separate Event content type items. The Event content type populates many of the widgets and pages on your website, and without any items, these will be empty and will have to be removed. The same can be said for the News, Announcements, or Newsletter content types.
Naming Convention: When uploading documents or images to your Media Library, proper naming convention is recommended so one can locate specific items with ease. For example, when uploading an image, instead of it’s original name like DSC_1560.jpg, rename it to something descriptive like children_playing_in_snow.jpg.
Setting to Draft vs Deleting: If there is a pre-existing page on your website that you want to delete because you are not using it, consider setting it to draft instead of deleting it. This way, if you decide to use that page, you will only have to Publish it, instead of recreating the page.
Staff Directory Emails: It is recommended that you include the emails for the teachers and administrators in the Staff Directory of your website.
Opening a Link in a New Window: When using a Page as a link to a document or an external source (the ‘Page Links To’ section), it is best to have it open in a new window by checking the box to the left of “Open this link in a new window”. This is so users don’t lose the page that they were previously on.
Menu Organization: When creating a page, you must choose a “Parent” page for it to be listed under. To change or set where this new page is located in that menu, set an “Order” number. The lower the number, the higher it is in the menu. If you find that items in your menu are changing position at random, this is because two or more pages are using the same “Order” number. The default order for a page is 0, so please change this when creating a new page. It is also important to note that the Top-Level Menu Item must link to the first item in it’s menu.
Newsletter Content Excerpt: When creating a Newsletter content type item, copy a small amount of text, preferably a paragraph, and paste it into the Newsletter’s body content area. This is the preferred way of creating a Newsletter, so when a user clicks on the Newsletter, the page it leads them to will have a brief excerpt of what is in the Newsletter PDF instead of a blank page with a link to the Newsletter PDF.
Creating Backups of TablePress Tables: It is a good idea to periodically backup your TablePress tables by navigating to the TablePress section of the Dashboard and selecting Export. Click the checkbox to the left of the list of tables, and the checkbox to the left of “Create a ZIP archive”. Once that has been done, click ‘Download Export File’. It is a good idea to store this ZIP file somewhere on your computer in case anything happens to your tables.
Leftover Formatting: Sometimes, when copying and pasting from a Word document or the like, the formatting will be copied as well (e.g. text colour, size, font, etc). The WYSIWYG text editor filters out most text formatting, but some may be copied. When copy/pasting from a document, please either “Paste as plain text”, or paste the text, select it, and click the eraser icon on the text editor menu (which erases any formatting selected).