Building a DFL Local Unit Website
A Tutorial
Getting Started
• In order to better communicate with local DFLers,
many party units will create websites with
information that is more pertinent to their region as
well as information from the central DFL website.
• To get started with this process, email Party Affairs
Once you submit your request, you will receive an email (shown to the right). Click on the link asking you to confirm the invite.
You will be taken to another page, where you can choose to go directly to the Word Press editing site.
This page is the Dashboard. The Dashboard is the main
page from which you maintain your Party Unit Website. The dark area to
the left is the sidebar. The sidebar contains the links to all things you can do to edit
Pages, the second option on the sidebar after home, is where you will edit the specific pages on your website. We’ll get to that later. First, we’ll talk about sliders. Sliders are essentially images that will appear on your front page. The section in the red box is the default slider which will appear on your front page. You can upload your own sliders or use the default one below.
Going back to the dashboard, we’ll discuss pages now. In the next several slides, I’m going to describe the main
pages that need to be personalized on every site. There are other pages that will be described later, but are less important.
About Us
About Us is one of the pages that is very important to maintain. On this page you
can put all of the basic information about your local
party unit. Some examples of info you can put on this page is the a map (which we’ll discuss on the next slide), precinct names, list of
cities in the party unit, etc. You may also combine the
About Us and the Our Officers page by including
your officers here.
To include any information on this page, just type in the box. To separate entries on this page, just include a line of space between one and the other. I’ll include a sample of this on the next slide.
Example of Edited Page
To edit any page, type in the large empty text box. As you can see, leaving a space between lines of text translates to a space between each line of text on the page. The editing system works the same on every page. On the About Us page, it is a good idea to include a map of the district. To learn how to include a map, go to http://en.support.wordpress.com/google-maps/ for a very good explanation on how to do that.
• The other slides that absolutely need to be edited
are Our Officers, Elected Officials, and Donate.
Editing will be the same process as shown in the
previous slide, but there are a couple things you’ll
need to do for the Elected Officials and Donate
pages in order to make them more functional and
effective for visitors to your site.
• In the next few slides, I’ll explain how to use
shortcodes to add pictures to your pages, and how
to link a bank account to accept donations.
Shortcodes
The screen-grab to the left is from the dashboard, the main page from which you edit your site. It explains how to include people on your site. When
editing the Elected Officials page, it is important to include pictures of all your officials. Every local unit site has access to every profile and picture that the DFL has, which is every
Linking a Bank Account
Put your mouse over tools on thesidebar, and select Manage Donations. You will be taken to the page shown below where you can include your Party Unit’s banking information so you can accept donations. On the next slide I’ll show you how to edit your Donations page.
Select Donate from your pages screen. You can put anything you’d like in the text box in the middle of the screen. To the right of the page though, you’ll see the box on this slide. Click on the drop-down menu under
Template and select Donation Form in order to have the best possible design for this page.
You will not be able to activate your Donate page unless you include your banking
Events Calendar
• The last of the main pages that should be edited is
the Events page. By default, your calendar feed is
automatically linked to the main DFL calendar feed.
• To create your own calendar, all you need to do is
navigate to the events page on the sidebar and
select add new. I’ll show you how to edit events on
the next slide.
• When you start adding events to your
calendar(instructions on next slide) be sure to get in
touch with David Weinlick again so he can add
your calendar feed to the main party calendar
feed.
Editing Events
Editing events is very simple. There are only three things required for adding an event: date and time, location details, and tags. The first two in that list are straightforward, but the event tags in the bottom right corner of the screen allows you to make a tag that sets your events apart from others. For all your events, you should tag them with your party unit name, for example SD 43 or Pennington. When adding tags,
separate them by commas. You can include the cost of attending the event if there is one, and contact info for whomever is organizing the event. Any further information can be added to the event in the text box on the add event page.
Appearance
The look of your website is fairly standard right away. However, if you’d like to
personalize it, the appearances page
allows you to customize the look of your site.
Themes: Allows you to change the colors and backgrounds of your site Menus: Will be discussed on next slide
Customize: Change the title of your site. Widgets: Will be discussed later
Backgrounds and Colors: Subcategory of themes
From the Menu page, you can edit which page links will appear on the home page of your website. You have the option of adjusting which order they
appear in (by clicking and dragging the boxes) or deleting and adding new ones as you edit them.
Widgets
These are widgets, they are small clickable boxes that allow users to
navigate to specific parts of the website.
While not the most necessary thing, you are able to edit widgets. You need only click and drag the ones you’d like on your site to the corresponding area. The widgets pictured at the top left are on the main sidebar, but there are other areas to include them including the footer region of the site.
