The first project was to make a website and to start populating it. The results are here, all around you – take a look.
This project will be continually ongoing and updated day-to-day as I add new pages and content to the website.
The purpose of this page is to document the making, populating and maintaining of the website – I intend to update it regularly.
Themes
I experimented with a few different themes that are available within WordPress and settled on Garfunkel as I feel like it has a simple and crisp look.
The background image is one that I took at a Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the Tate Modern.
Olafur Eliasson exhibition, Tate Modern 2019
Menus
When I had made a couple of posts and pages I experimented with how to edit the top menus so that each page is available.
It is possible to edit the menus by selecting the Menus from the Appearance drop-down options when on the website Dashboard.
That will take you to the menu edit page which allows you to add pages and posts to the menus. It also allows you to position the pages and post both in order of where they appear in the menu but also hierarchically.
This hierarchical positioning allows you to set pages and posts as sub items to other pages. This means that these pages appear as a drop-down option on the actual website. This is useful if you have many pages that all relate to one parent page.
One useful thing to note is that there are some options at the bottom of the menu page. It is worth auto adding pages so that when a new page is created you don’t have to manually add it to your menu. You can also add a social menu which adds small social media icons on our webpage if you wished to link to your social media pages.
Plugins
Plugins are installable programs, created by WordPress (WP) community members, that provide additional features for your site. They can be simple things that make it easier for the site owner to add content like the Easy Tables Plugin or fun user experience stuff like adding a snowing effect over the top of a page.
Unfortunately as the website I’m creating is powered by WP but hosted by edublogs and they don’t allow for additional plugins to be installed.
Regardless, here is some info if you have a “normal” WP site:
- Details for installing plugins for ‘normal’ WP sites can be found here
- Details on the limitations of WP powered but not hosted sites can be found here
What can be done
On an edublogs site you can only use the limited number of pre-approved plugins that are pre-installed. These can be found by going to the plugins tab via the admin dashboard.
Plugins on this page can be activated and deactivated.
Finally, it is possible to request a plugin to be added to the approved list, this is done by contacting edublogs support.
Info about edublogs plugins, activation/deactivation and approval requests can all be found here:
Media
Photos, videos, documents and more can all be added to WP sites. It is stupid easy to add photos so I’m not gonna say much about it now (I will come the summative)…
Embedding
Embedding a video is a method of inserting the video into a site that it is being hosted externally and reduces the memory required to load your page. It is a very useful technique but it does require you to upload your videos to a hosting site such as YouTube or Google drive.
Personally, I keep all my files on my Google drive but the process to get the embed code is a little more complicate that it should be:
- Find or upload the Video file to Google drive
- Set Share Setting to Public, anyone with link can view
- Select Preview
- Click the “More Actions” icon (3 vertical Dots) upper right corner
- Select “Open in New Window”
- Click “More Actions” again. and
- Select and copy Embed Code
.GIF
Animated .gif images can be added to a WP site the same as any normal image, via the media uploader. The key difference is that when inserted into a page they only animate if inserted as ‘full size’. This is because when a image or .gif is uploaded to WP it creates three different sized versions of the image: ‘thumbnail, medium, and large’. As well as keeping the original image in full size.
WP ends up saving only the first frame of a .gif when creating the different image sizes. This is why if you add any of those image sizes into a page they will be static images with no animation.
There are plugins available that allow searching and inserting .gif(s) directly via the site admin page – https://wordpress.org/plugins/giphypress/
