Login
You will go here to login: https://susannaplotnick.com/wp-admin using your username (susanna) and password. If you forget your password you can click “Lost your password?” to get an email to re-set it.
The login will open a dashboard where the options you need to update the site content are all in a black sidebar on the left. When you are logged in you (and only you) will also see a black toolbar at the top of every page and post in your live site, with links enabling you to edit pages and posts or create new pages and posts. The links to pages will only open the top-level (parent) page you are looking at, so if you on an index page that includes content from child-pages or multiple posts, you will need to use “edit” links in the page itself (if they are available) or find the individual child-pages or posts via the dashboard.
DASHBOARD
Briefly (more details follow), you’ll be using:
Posts to write new articles for the blog (or edit existing posts).
Books to add or edit books
Pages to edit the content of all the other pages
Media to add images, audio files and pdfs (particularly if uploading in large batches)
Image ALT Text to add or edit SEO-friendly descriptions for images
SEO Entry to add or edit search-engine-optimized page-titles and meta descriptions for each page or post.
Within any Dashboard section, there are multiple ways of filtering the items in the list and there is always “search” if there is one particular item you want to find and you know the title.
There is also a tab at the very top of the window for “Screen Options” and here you will find options such as changing the number of items per page in the list.
ADDING NEW BLOG POSTS
Click “Add New” under Posts and enter title and text, using the formatting tools available to add sub-headers if you need to break up the text, use bold, italics, add links etc. You can also add images to posts using the “Add Media” link. Generally the “Visual” editor is all you need.
If you want to add a link, use the link icon in the formatting toolbar. There’s an option to set links to open the destination page in a new window, and it’s a good idea to do this if you are linking to another website (so your visitor can easily return to your site if they want to).
The “Text” editor tab can be useful if you want to add html for a special reason. You can view the post in preview mode via a link in the black toolbar at the top of the page (which will remain over your public site while you are logged in and will allow you to edit any post or page from the page itself). You can save the post in draft mode until it is ready to publish. Click “Publish” when you are ready to publish the post to live.
ADDING NEW “BOOKS”
The records for your artworks are created with a custom post-type called “Books”
You can create a new book record from the live site when you are logged in by using the “New > Book” link. Make sure the kind of post you have selected is “Book” as the different kinds of posts are set up differently.
Give your book its title as you create the record so that the url that is generated for the record reflects the name (before you click “publish”). If you don’t do this, the system will generate a url based on the record’s unique ID—which isn’t terrible, but it’s preferable to have a descriptive url for easier identification.
The “featured image” for each book will be the background image that I will make for you but you can get the book page started with the text and gallery of images if you would like. The text goes at the top of the main field and when you click to open a new paragraph, there will be add-image and add-gallery icons above to allow you to add the gallery of thumbnails. Once you click that “Add Gallery” icon, you are shown a message to: “Drag images, upload new ones or select files from your library.” Add the images you want and click the “Create a New Gallery” button then the “Insert Gallery” button and finally, back on the page itself, remember to save the page (either publish it or save the draft, depending on what stage you are at). If you publish the page before it is ready, you can always go back and change its status to “draft” and it will hide it from public view.
When you are ready to click “Publish” edit the year of the publication date to match the year the book was published.
EDITING THE PAGES
When you are logged in, you can use the “Edit Page” links in the black toolbar at the top of the page to open the pages for Biography, Contact, Dolls & Puppets and for Narrative Paintings & Illustrations in edit mode and make changes to the images and/or to the texts.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION WORK
Search engines rely heavily on the texts on your pages to determine whether or not your content is likely to be of interest to someone who has entered a particular search. Text that is styled as a header will be understood by search engines to be particularly important and phrases that occur with frequency will also be understood to be particularly important.
Wherever your website includes texts, it is worth looking at the text you have on the page to see if it includes phrases that someone who’d be interested in the page content might actually type into a search.
In addition to the on-page text (and especially if your pages are image-heavy, text-light), you should use the options for search engine optimization that allow you to add descriptions that don’t show on the pages themselves. This will make your site significantly more effective if you do it well.* These are as follows:
Image ALT Text
Here you should describe your images in a way that both describes the image content and is also a good additional hint for search engines about what the page content is about (use phrases that people are likely to put into search engines). This content can be entered image-by-image when you upload an image or you can add/edit the image alt text via a link in the dashboard sidebar.
SEO Title and Meta Description
Neither of these is visible on the page itself but they provide the content for search engines to understand your pages and the title and probably also the meta description will show up in the search results in search engines. This can also be done page by page (in the Yoast SEO section; delete the default texts that are there and replace with more targeted phrases) but it can be easier to work from a list-page like the one available via the “SEO Entry” link in the dashboard sidebar. You can open the page or post by clicking on the title to copy/paste a bit of the text to use for the meta-description.