Hi! This is Claire with AllstarCheerSites and this is the Boom Starting Point Implementation Call.
Before we get started, I do want to remind you that even if you’re reading this step-by-step guide and are taking the time to learn how to use this system, if you would rather our team enter content for you and get everything set-up as needed, we are happy to do so. But we are thrilled that you’re taking the time to learn how to use the site and how to make edits on your end.
To start with - I want to go over are pieces of the Boom Starting Point that, if needed to be changed, should only be done on our end.
Here are the items:
· The social media icons - If these have not yet been connected, we will need to get those icons from you so that we can add those in.
· The Gym Phone Number – We’ll need to get from you as well. And again, if it’s incorrect here, we need to correct that for you.
· On the main menu bar - We’ve already added the pages you requested, so those are ready to go. We’ve got the drop downs you requested as well. If you decide that there’s another page or drop down that you need, you can create that on your end, and then we can add it in the system for you.
· The Photos you’ve sent over are already placed in the slider as well. If you decide to swap up photos, or add more photos, you can have as many as you like but our team will put them in for you since the photos and the slides have to be of specific size.
· The 3 (three) Boxes that you’ve requested are set up as well, and they are already linked to the pages that you’ve requested here as well. If any point in time you need to change one of these boxes, that’s something we can do for you. We’ll just need to know what you want to change the title to, what you want to change the little snippet paragraph to, and the new page we can link the box to.
· The Opt-In Box - This is where you will offer something to your prospective clients in exchange for their contact information so that you can add them to your list. Most folks just do, request coupons, a free one on one coaching which is a different way of saying evaluation, a ….. administration, any number of things. Whatever you choose, it is fine. We’ll just update this for you. And then you will have access to make you own blog post. We will need to update the opt-in box for you as well.
You will be able to update the welcome here, and the testimonials are pieces that we need to update for you as well.
So without further ado, let’s dive on in.
In the email in which you receive this video, you should also have received your log-in credentials so that you can access the dashboard. A few pieces that you don’t need to worry about are Tools and Portfolio items. These are posts for our team, so don’t worry about that.
We’re actually going to start with:
Profile
The username that you were given is your First and Last Name (all in one word and in lowercase). The password however, is something long and crazy so that it can be protected and then changed after you have logged in the first time.
To change the password, you need to:
1. Go to the Profile page.
2. Scroll down a bit and look for the New Password and repeat New Password.
3. Fill up the data and save the password by pressing the Update button.
Note: It’s very important that you change the password as soon as you log-in for the first time. That way you can make sure that your site is staying secured and locked down.
Post
Posts are going to show up in the sidebar of all your interior pages. We had it set up so that the 5 (five) most recent posts will show up. If you have more than 5 (five), it will not be a big deal. There will be an older post option where folks can go back and look through your older posts.
1. To Add New Post: Go to Post, and then press to Add New.
2. You can write your title on the Title Space and Content on the Content Space.
Tools
· To get access to more tools, click on the Kitchen Sink button in the tools section. It’s going to give us a second layer of tools. There’s a lot you can do here, with your blog post.
· You can choose whether to Bold, Italicize, Strikethrough, Bullets, Quotes, or a combination for your text.
· You can change Alignment (Right, Center, Left, Justified, etc.) using the alignment buttons.
· You can change the Size and the Impact of your font, you can do Underline.
· You can change the Font Color.
· You can also add Links.
If you want to talk about your Jazz program in your post, using a link to a page that’s on your website, you just need the slug, or anything that goes after the “.com”. For instance (/jazzpage/)
For instance, we can write something like To learn more about our jazz program, please click here.
To place a link:
1. Highlight Click Here (from the sentence).
2. Then click on Insert /Edit Link button (tools section).
3. In the URL section, just enter the Slag (Note: Only if were linking to a page on your website).
4. If you’re linking to an article from another site, you will need to post in the Entire URL.
5. After which, click Add Link, and the link has been added.
Another option you have on Posts, as well as Pages is to Add Media. That includes JPEG’s (pictures, flyers, similar files) as well as PDF’s (waivers, handbooks, any forms that needed to be filled out).
Adding Media
If you want to add music/audio or video to the site, we suggest you do so using a third party. Soundcloud or S3 account for your music, and something like Youtube, Vimeo, or Vivo for your video.
The reason we ask that is, because music files or video files can be very large files, and if you are uploading them directly to your website, it’s going to eat up a lot of your site’s server space, which means that your site is going to load much slower than most other sites. And one other thing that Google tweaked with their search engine results back in the beginning of 2014, and page load time now does have quite the bearing on where your site might show up in search engine rankings.
So, if it takes a long time for your site to load because you have raw music files and raw video files, that can negatively impact your search engine results.
If you want to add some music, you can do so either through an S3 account and you can embed the link here. Same thing with Soundcloud, it’s gonna look like its plying form your site. It’s actually gonna be using the Soundcloud server, and making that one work a little harder. And the same goes with videos.
If you upload your videos to Youtube or Vimeo, then all we need is the URL of the video. We can embed it in the site, and it’s going to look like it’s playing from the site, yet it’s not going to eat up your server space.
Adding Photo to BlogPost:
So, all that said, let’s say that you want to add a photo to your blog post. Here are the steps:
1. On the content section, place your cursor on wherever you want to media file to be placed.
2. Then click on Add Media. It’s going to give you a couple of options. You can either upload photos from your computer or use existing one from the Media Library.
3. To upload from Computer, click on Select Files, and then pick the file you want to be uploaded.
4. If the file is already in your media library, Just click on Media Library and choose the file you want.
We can change the title, the caption, put an alternate text or descriptions. The reason we might want to do that is because search engines do not understand a photo. They understand text. So, if you want to boost your photos in search engine results as well, putting in a title and alternate text, description, and that nature will let search engines know what it is they’re looking at.
Attachment Display Settings
Whatever it is you choose (add that or not), the next piece of the process is the attachment display settings.
You can choose:
· None - photo’s will be on top, and text of your post is going to be below it. If you
· Right - your photos going to be on the right, and the text is going to wrap around to the left.
· Center - the photo will be on the center, and the text will wrap around on either side.
· Left - your photos will be on the left, and the text is going to wrap around to the right.
Your next option is to link to specific pieces. (Link To option – Right Section in Insert Media Section visible when file is chosen. And here are the choices and what they do.
· Media File (helpful if you’re talking about flyers, waivers, handbooks, things like that, or things that you might want the folks to be able to save, print, bring in, things of that nature). However, if you are dealing with images of your athletes, you might not want to link to media files, because you’ll never know who’s out there looking at your website, and linking to pictures of your students or Athletes could be that safe.
· Attachment page is an intermediary page between your blog post or your static page and the media file. Now this will still eventually take folks to the media file, so then we don’t recommend it for a photo. But even past that, a lot of folks have found some confusion, cause what happens is if you link to a media file, clicking it will lead to another page and it’s going to ask you to click on the file name. Then, it’s going to take you to the actual file. So, a lot of folks will click on the file and it will take them to the attachment page where they can click on the file name, and they don’t know that they need to click on the file name. And so folks will get people saying, hey I think it’s working, but it’s not working because they don’t know that you need to click twice. So to avoid confusion, we recommend not using the attachment page.
· Custom URL. So again, if we’re linking this photo to a Jazz Page, we can link the photo to a Jazz Page as well. And if we wanted to link to something else, maybe were trying to encourage the folks to sign-up to classes, and we got Jackrabbit or something, we can link to Jackrabbit. This allows the photo to, when you click it, take them to the URL. Or if you just like the photo, and you just want to break up the text, which is highly recommended, you can link to none.
And the final piece is to choose what size.
1. If you’re dealing with a large photo, you’re going be dealing with a bunch of different options. We recommend finding something in the 300-ish pixel range (MEDIUM), especially if you’re using it in your content. That way it is large enough that it can be seen, but is not large enough that it becomes distracting.
2. Choose Medium
3. Click Insert to Post.
And now we have our image, and we have our content, and were ready to go.
When we click Publish, it’s going to show under recent post with your title. Clicking on the link will lead you to your post. If you click on “Click Here” it’s going to take you to the jazz page, as we said it would.
If you want to boost your search engine rankings, we recommend writing a blog post at least once a week.
Tips in Writing Blogs:
· Write about an interesting Topic in your industry
· Write about something that Happened in your Gym or Events
· Share Happenings in your town where your gym is participating/sponsoring in
· Make it between 300-600 words
We understand that you’re not always going to have 40 minutes in a Monday sitting down and write your blog post, so scheduling your post is something we recommend as well.
Set/Change the Dates of the Blogposts:
We can back date a post if we want it. Or, what’s really helpful is, we can schedule this in advance. Maybe we want this to go out on the next month Instead.
To set / change the dates:
1. Click on Edit(beside the Publish Immediately text – right side)
2. Choose a Date (For Back Dates - Click Ok)
3. For Future Posting - Click on Schedule
4. Then refresh the interior page.
For future posts, It won’t appear in the recent posts just yet, but if we go back to the Dashboard, we’re going to see “Publishing Soon” on October 10th, and your title will go here.
So that’s the post section.
If you’re comfortable with posts, Pages are just as easy. So we’re going to stick with Jazz again, since you’ve seen that working for us. Let’s say that this is one of the pages that you requested. We’ve got some place for the content here for you. You can edit how you see it fit, maybe get rid of this, or maybe change the phone number, whatever you want to do, when we’ve made updates, just click on the blue update button and if we refresh, our updates will have taken place.
Now, if you would like to add a new page, say you would like to add a page about Choreography and maybe got a form that you want people to fill out and send back to you in order to book your choreography services.
Adding PDF to a Page:
If you want to add a PDF to this page:
1. move your cursor and go to Add Media
2. In the Upload Files section, go to Select Files
3. Grab the PDF file (Whatever you put in as the title, it’s going to be what shows up for viewers to click on.
4. Input Title. You can write something like “Click here to fill out our Choreography Form”, and it’s going to ask where you want it to link to.
5. With the PDF file, you’re only going to get 2 Link To Options. MediaFile or Attachment Page. We recommend media file over the attachment page.
6. Once done, click Insert into page.
Now when you click publish, 2 (two) things are going to happen:
· The first thing that’s going to happen is, you’re going to tell the search engines to go and start indexing the page, and this only happens if your site is live. If you’re site hasn’t gone live yet, we haven’t let the search engine see what’s happening yet, so don’t worry about that. If the site is live, and you click publish, it allows the search engines to index the page.
· The other thing it does is it gives you a page URL, so if you didn’t really want to offer Choreography to everyone, but there are 5 to 6 people that you though could use your choreography services, you can just give them this URL. It gives them the content in it, and it gives them the link to fill out the choreography form, which, if we open to another window will actually pull-out my PDF.
What it does not do, is automatically add your choreography page to your main menu. And, the reason for that is, if we go back to your home screen, you actually got 3 (three) menu options. You got your main menu here, you can link your images and your sliders to pages, and you got your 3 (three) buttons here. So we’re not really sure where you’re going to want your Choreography page to be added.
So, when you click publish, it is not going to be automatically added as a new tab on your main header. Once you click publish, if you wanted it to be added to these 3 (three) menu structures, you just need to contact your implementation concierge, let them know you’ve created a new page called Choreography, and where you would want it to be placed.
Now I do quickly want to point out Media, and we’ve talked a little bit about it. You’ll notice that with media, you’ll have a couple of options. Edit, Delete Permanently, or View. So make sure that before you delete something permanently, you are sure that you won’t have to use it anymore, or it wasn’t used as part of your site background, or one of your slider images. If it is deleted permanently, it is completely gone from the media library, and it will need to be either recreated or re-uploaded in order to be useable. But the real reason why I wanted to show you the media library is if you go to add new, you can choose as many files as you like, upload all at once, and that way, if you’ve uploaded a bunch of photos from a competition on your work computer, but you want to get some work at home, you don’t have to worry about uploading them to your home computer as well cause you’ve now uploaded them to the media library, and they’re there for your use, or if you choose to delegate some of this tasks, maybe have a staff member blog for this once a week, they’ll have photos they can use on the blog post. And then once they’re on the media library, and again, unless they are deleted permanently, even if you haven’t linked them to a post or anything, they are there for your use.
Events Calendar
The Next thing I’m going to show you is our interactive Events Calendar. And this is something very cool, and very helpful. This is something that you have requested already, it’s already been set-up. If you haven’t requested an interactive event calendar, you just have to write it into note that it is something you are interested in, and they can help you get it set-up on the site, but you can, in the meantime, be adding events.
So to add an event in the interactive calendar:
1. Go to Add New, and you’re going to enter your event title and event details.
2. It’s going to ask if it’s a whole day event. Choose which one.
3. Choose an End Time. This can be very helpful if you’re dealing with a competition you’re not really sure you’re going to be back from. Otherwise, you got your Start Date / time and End Date / Time.
4. You can put in your time zone.
5. You can choose if you have the event repeat either on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis, either on the day of the month or day of the week, maybe have it on the 1st Monday, as well as Yearly.
6. You can also choose to exclude specific dates if you have something repeating. This is very helpful if you want to have your class schedule part of your interactive calendar and you know you’re going to be closed on the last two weeks of December, you can exclude those dates and it will show up.
7. You can put in event location details. Venue Name and Address, you can show Google map or input your own coordinates if you like.
8. If the event cost money, you can buy tickets in advance, you can write that information as well. If it’s a free event, you can just click free event.
9. And, if someone other than you is organizing it, you can put in their information here as well.
10. And then we’ve got your brief description which you can put in here.
11. Again, if it’s not already been set up on your site, you can either yourself or have our team add a new event category. We’ll add the category, and we’ll click publish.
Now what that will do is it will create an event for us. You can go ahead and open it in a new window. It’s going to show me, all the details that you chose. You can add it to one of your calendars, you can go back to the main calendar, you can see it in agenda view, maybe as a day view, as a month view, as a week view, you’ve got a lot of different options here and then I’ve got my different categories.
So you got a lot of great options with the interactive calendar, that’s something you know you want to use, or something that you’re not sure you want to use yet, that’s fine. Again, nothing in the website is, as far as something goes is setting stone. It’s always going to be updating and changing things like that. So if you find that having an event calendar like this is helpful at any point in time, just have your implementation Concierge know, and our team will get it set up on the website for you.
Comments
And the final thing that I’m going to touch on is comments. Now, your website is built on wordpress, which when wordpress came out many years ago, it was really used as a blogging platform, which meant that it was very easy for the authors to use, it is very easy for clients to find, and very easy to really build a sense of community. So to that end, you have commenting available on your blog post. No, this is good and bad, because it allows your parents, your athletes, or your staff to communicate with each other, leave comments or messages to each other, but it’s also a way that spammers could feasibly try to get folks to click on pieces of information. So, to safeguard against that, our team has installed a anti-spam software that learn what spam comments look like. So, once the site is live, anytime you get a comment or someone tries to post a comment, you will get an email that says someone has tried to leave this comment, and here’s the comment.
1. To approve, click here. Approve means, it’s a great comment, people will find it handy and useful, yes we’ll approve it.
2. Trash it means that it’s not spam per se, but maybe the information in the comment is incorrect. Maybe there’s kind of a tone in the comment that’s rubbing you the wrong way, or it’s just something that you don’t want posted in the blog post.
3. And then it also says, If its Spam, click here. If you want to know what a spam looks like, it’s something like this. A bunch of gibberish links that could be clicked on, and you’re not really sure who this person is. If you mark this as spam, it teaches the software that is on your site, “Hey that’s what a spam comment looks like”. And eventually, within a matter of weeks, The system is learning “Hey this stuff is appropriate, this stuff is not”, and anything that it thinks is spam, it will automatically trash for you so that you’ll never have to see it. So that’s how commenting works.
And that is the entire system. Now as I mentioned before, just because you’ve taken the time to watch this video, which we do appreciate you taking the time to watch this video, does not mean that you are on your own. It’s all completely up to you to upload all this content, and Good luck to you. Not the case at all, If you want to start uploading content to the pages, to post, or events, go for it. If you still want to use your implementation concierge and our team to help you upload the content, help you get everything ready to go, and order to launch, we’re more than happy to do so.
Just let us know, and were ready to be helpful however we can. Also along with the link to this video and the login credentials, you should also receive the list of the information that we need to make your site live. If you have any questions about that, just let your implementation concierge know and we’ll be happy to walk you through that as well.
Thank you so much for watching the Boom Starting Point Implementation Call. If at any point you have any questions, or our team can help in anyway, please just let us know.