* Here are some notes on how to use this website.*
Pages
With one or two exceptions, the Pages are everything that shows up in the main Navigation menu. Pages are generally static and only edited occasionally.
Posts
Posts are more dynamic and timely, like news articles or social media posts. They can also be categorized, queried (to show specific categories of posts on specific pages) and are highly portable, meaning they can be dropped into lots of different environments.
You likely will be mainly working with Posts.
Use Featured Images
When you create a new Page or Post, please try to always include a Featured Image. (See the illustration below.) This is the main image that will appear at the top of the page and in various queries and summaries around the website for the post.
The Featured Image panel can be found under the Page tab in the editing area. It is near the bottom.
Important: Categories
Every Post you create will have a Category assigned to it. This is important because, in certain cases, the Category will affect where the Post will appear on the website.
Homepage
If you want a Post to appear under the News & Announcements section on the homepage, make sure it is checked as News.
If you don’t want an item to appear on the homepage, make sure News is unchecked.
Press Releases
If you are creating a Press Release Post that you want to appear on the Press page, make sure to assign the Post a Category of Press Releases.
Other
The rest of the Categories, at the time of this writing, are simply for declaring what type of content is in any given Post. The categories currently include topics such as Health Care, Civil Rights, and Public Health.
You may add or remove Categories, just as long as the News and Press Releases Categories stay as-is.
Accessibility & Semantic Markup
It is very important that this website remain as accessible as possible, both for users with special needs (vision or hearing, in particular), and also to make the site rank well with search engines, which check for site semantics and accessibility.
Alternative Text on Images
Make it a habit to always add alternative text (commonly called “alt tags”) to any image you add to the website. The alt tag is a short description of the image that is accessible to screen readers and search engine crawlers.
Alt tags should be added both to Featured Images and to inline images that you place into the body of any Page or Post.
The alt tag should simply describe the purpose of the image. Image if you couldn’t see the page: what would you need the alt tag to say in order to convey the purpose of the image?
If you cannot immediately figure out how to add an alt tag to an existing Featured Image, you should be able to do so from the Media Library.
Semantics
Part of accessibility is making the website structured in such a way that it will appear organized as a hierarchical outline to any screen readers or web crawlers.
One of the ways to do this is to make sure that the most important headings are listed as H1 headings. The next most-important headings are H2s, followed by H3s, and so on, in that order. You should not be jumping directly from an H1 to an H4, because that does not make semantic sense to a screen reader.
Body copy should generally be p (paragraph) tags or lists.
Videos
All videos should have closed captioning. If the video is posted to YouTube and added to the website, Google will probably add the closed captioning automatically… but double check when you post.
A Few Technical Things
Use Strong Passwords
Use strong passwords. Use strong passwords. Use strong passwords. WordPress will suggest passwords, which are strong. Use them.
Database
This website’s database backs itself up every evening and can be retrieved through the web host.
WordPress
Please check the WordPress software and plugins regularly, and back them up whenever needed. This is important for site security.
Homepage
The top section of the homepage cannot be edited through WordPress (the design is part of the html).
Thanks for reading this. If you have questions, you can contact me at grantcorley@gmail.com
Grant