Site admin - Introduction
These Help pages are ‘Private’ and can only be viewed by people logged in as Editor or Administrator.
How this site works
This site uses WordPress as an editor. Although there is plenty of documentation on the internet about how to use WordPress, most of it won’t be helpful to you because this site has been custom built for your needs by Wingfinger Graphics and is just using WordPress as a way you can manage your content.
If you get stuck or something doesn’t seem to be working any more, try contacting Wingfinger – 0113 245 0469 – during office hours or drop us an email. We will generally keep an eye on the site and may update relevant software etc from time to time.
The Admin area
To make any changes to the site, you need to log in to the Admin area, and you should have a username and a password for this. Add ‘/wp-admin’ to the web domain to get here, or click on the hidden link – hover at the far bottom right of a page, directly under the Wingfinger Graphics link. Whenever you are logged in, the black Admin bar will be visible across the top of the browser window (normal site visitors won’t see it).
Warning! If you don’t know what you’re doing inside the Admin area then you could easily break the site! Anything that mentions updating software is best left alone and may have knock-on effects on how the site works – Wingfinger will advise when updates are required.
The Dashboard is the ‘home page’ for the Admin area and gives you access to all the control functions of the site via the Admin bar and the main menu on the left.
NB: If the instructions on these pages ever seem to refer to a panel, menu or button that you just can’t find, try clicking Screen Options (top right of the Admin area in the yellow bar) and ticking the relevant box.
Editing the site
What you can change
Each page on this website is made up of two bits:
- CMS-editable areas – containing the content (text and images that go with it, links and media etc). These are the bits you can edit and include the main content area (the wide central column that contains most of the text) and a number of additional regions that can be used to hold extra content, eg: region right.
- The page template – the structure, styling, menus and technical web stuff that determine the overall look and behaviour of the page. You can not edit the page template.
Posts, Pages and Snippets
Almost everything you do in the Admin area will be in the Posts, Pages and Snippets sections which are accessed from the left hand menu in the dashboard. When you go in to edit any of these, you will find the same looking editing area – a window with a field for the title, a field for the text content with a toolbar and below a Wingfinger widgets box for adding extra content in the regions.
- Pages are static, contain permanent content and can be added to the navigation menu. Pages do not use tags or categories. Pages have regions to display extra content.
- Posts are content entries (like blogs) and are sorted by categories (eg factsheet). They might appear on their own, or in a region as extra content.
- Snippets are short chunks of text, images or links that are used mostly as extra content in the page/post regions. The content of a parallax panel is creted in a snippet.
- Site notes are used for the help pages found in the the black Admin bar across the top of page. These Help pages are ‘Private’ and can only be viewed by people logged in as Editor or Administrator.
