Building a DFL Local Unit Website A Tutorial

Transcription

1 Building a DFL Local Unit Website A Tutorial

2 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, Party Affairs Director David Weinlick at

3 Once you submit your request, you will receive an (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.

4 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 your site.

5 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.

6 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.

7 About Us 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. 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.

8 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 for a very good explanation on how to do that.

9 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.

10 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 official holding major office.

11 Linking a Bank Account Put your mouse over tools on the sidebar, 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.

12 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 information as shown on the previous slide.

13 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.

14 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.

15 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 Main Site Blog Categories: Categories you can choose posts to fall under

16 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.

17 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.

18 With this information in hand, you should be able to create a functioning, informative local unit DFL website. There are plenty of other things you can do with your website. Visit to learn more about what you can do with your website, or to clarify some things you might be having trouble with. If you have any further questions, contact the party affairs department at partyaffairs@dfl.org. Good Luck! -DFL Party Affairs Department