Login

You will go here to login: http://www.agarik.hamwebs.com/wp-admin [* will be http://www.alicegarik.com/wp-admin when site is live ] using your username (alice) 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 news section (or edit existing posts).

Work to add or edit artworks

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 editsearch-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 which to revert.

ADDING NEW NEWS POSTS

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 when you are logged in by using the “New > Work” link. 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 (1500px high max) using the “Set Featured Image” link.

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 (flora, fauna, sea)

Complete all of the “Artwork Data” that you want to be displayed for the work (year, media, dimensions, price). 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).

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 and you can edit the images for the carousel by selecting the full gallery of images in the main content field (click the stacked-images icon top-left to activate) and adding/deleting them around there. Use the < > arrows to adjust the order of the individual images within the gallery.

The statement is now editable in a new statement field below.

The testimonials are added as a custom post-type called testimonials.

Remember to click “update” to save your changes.

About The Work and Bio pages

When you are logged in, you can use the “Edit Page” links in the black toolbar at the top of the page to open these pages in edit mode and make changes to the featured images and/or to the texts.

Choose Heading H2 to create sub-headings within the text.

When you want to upload a new cv, upload a pdf using the “Add media” link and edit the title of the link to read “View c.v.”

Contact

There may 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.

Working with Images for your Website:

Adding Image Captions

The captions are added in the fields available with the image itself. You can either add them by going into the media library and clicking an image into edit mode there or, if you click on the image after you have added it to a “work” post, you will see a toolbar of options to edit or delete the image appears. Click the pencil icon in that toolbar to open the image in edit mode and you’ll see a field for the caption. Add the caption there and click “update”.

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 ofyour efforts, you can contact rhm@hamwebs.com for help.