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 and has been custom built for your needs by Wingfinger Graphics . It’s just using WordPress as a way you can manage your content so a lot of the wordpredd documentation that exists on the internet won’t be helpful to you.

If you get stuck or something doesn’t seem to be working any more, try contacting Wingfinger – 0113 2450 469 – 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. If you have not got a monthly maintenance contract with us and something essential needs doing, we will be in touch.

The Admin area

To make 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 (bookmark it), or click on the hidden link – hover at the top right, usually over the pile of books. Whenever you are logged in, the dark grey Admin bar will be visible across the top of the browser window (normal site visitors won’t see it and it doesn’t affect anything to do with how your pages are displayed below).

Warning! If you don’t know what you’re doing inside the Admin area you could break the site! Anything that mentions updating software is best left alone and may have knock-on effects on how the site works – leave it for Wingfinger’s to maintain or contact us.

The Dashboard is the ‘home page’ for the Admin area and gives you access to all the site control functions via the Admin bar above and the main menu down the left. Once you have logged in, clicking on ‘A Quiet Word‘ in the grey bar will toggle between the Admin area and the website public view.

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 (a white tab in the top right of the Admin area sticking out under the admin bar) and ticking the relevant box.

Editing the site

Each page on this website is made up of two parts:

  • CMS-editable areas – the page content (text and images, links, media etc). These are the bits you can edit and include the main content area (the wide central column) and a number of additional spaces – ‘Regions’ – that may be used to hold special content that Wingfinger has set up for you.
  • The website template – the structure, styling, menus and technical stuff that determine the overall look and behaviour of the page. You cannot edit these but there may be certain content items within the template that you can edit.

Pages and Posts

Almost everything you do in the Admin area will be in the Posts, Pages and Snippets sections. When you go in to edit any of these, you will find the same editing area – a window containing the content with a toolbar (a bit like in Word) and a title bar above it.

  • Pages are the web pages listed in the main menu – permanent content that is usually pre-planned before the site is designed. As of July 2015 these are: Home, People, Projects (Archive and Current are child pages to Projects) and Contact.
  • Posts tend to be shorter and are often time-related (News items and Project entries) and  usually categorised. They might appear on their own, but are usually part of a group of similar posts and may appear in a list.
  • Snippets are short chunks of text, images or links that are used mostly in Regions or form part of the site Template. They are edited in the same way as posts.