Instruction & Documentation

Let’s Take it One Step at a Time

Whether you’re new to editing or someone who has edited multiple websites, here is where you can access instruction, best practices, and understand the things to avoid as a Site Content Editor (SCE).

Brand New SCE?
Brand new SCEs will need to complete the steps outlined in the New Editor Onboarding Process

Need additional support?
Please reach out to WebServices@kzoo.edu to arrange a one-on-one training.

Page Content:

SCE Roles and Responsibilities

SCE Responsibilities

All SCEs are required to sign the Web Content Editor Agreement Form, signifying their agreement to the Kalamazoo College guidelines, standards, and policies. These guidelines, standards, and policies outline SCE Responsibilities when editing a website. The acknowledgement is as follows:

I acknowledge that I have read and understand the Kalamazoo College web policy. I understand that the content I publish must: reflect the goals of Kalamazoo College; comply with the Honor System; conform to federal and state laws, licenses, contracts, copyrights, and the policies of Kalamazoo College; adhere to College standards; not be used for commercial purposes.

I understand that Kalamazoo College reserves the right to take down any content that does not conform to these policies, and that violation of these policies may result in revocation of publishing privileges.

WordPress Editor Roles

SCE Roles – WordPress uses a concept of Roles, designed to control what editors can and cannot do within the site. Here at K, we use a combination of custom roles and a few default roles from WordPress.

Web Services Responsibilities

In Web Services we are your primary point of content for all things WordPress related! Visit the training and support page for more information on the support we offer our SCEs.

What you should know before editing…

Implementing these practices will help ensure a smooth and effective editing experience in WordPress.

  1. Reference WordPressHelp.kzoo.edu – This website is your best resource for learning to edit WordPress at K—use it for guidance instead of Google!
  2. Use a Supported Browser – Ensure you’re using a browser compatible with WordPress, such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.
  3. Save Your Work Regularly – Frequently save your progress to avoid losing changes.
  4. Understand User Roles and Permissions – Familiarize yourself with your user role to know your editing capabilities within WordPress.
  5. Preview Changes Before Publishing – Use the preview function to review your edits before making them live.
  6. Follow Accessibility Guidelines – Adhere to accessibility standards to make your content accessible to all users.
  7. Resize and Compress Images – Gain the skills needed to ensure images are high quality and optimized for the web to enhance site performance.
  8. Requirements and Best Practices – From copying text over from a Word document or adding images, there are certain requirements and best practices to follow when adding content.
  9. Maintenance is Essential – Websites must be consistently maintained to stay clean, functional, accessible, and accurate. Regular upkeep—weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually—not only ensures compliance and usability but also preserves server storage and enhances site performance. Removing outdated content, optimizing media, and managing storage efficiently contribute to a faster, more reliable website experience.

SCE Training Guides

Get started with our training guides, which provide tours, step-by-step instructions, key considerations, best practices, and requirements. Each section includes hands-on exercises to help you practice and build confidence in using WordPress.

Guide 1: Your WP Interface as an Editor

As an SCE you need to learn more than just changing a sentence here and there, but you need to know the details of how to move around the backend. Roll up your sleeves and learn how to use the WordPress interface as an editor. Here you will get a better sense of what you can expect from your personal dashboard, how to access all of the posts and pages of your website, your Media Library, and depending on your WP role and additional website enhancements, you may also have access to more plugins.

Select a topic you would like to explore:

Dashboard and Navigation
Posts
Media
Pages
Comments
Appearance
Profile
Broken Links

Dashboard & Navigation

Your Dashboard is your home base in WordPress, while the left menu and top toolbar serve as your primary navigation tools. Explore all available options to efficiently manage and navigate WordPress as an SCE.

Dashboard and Navigation Instruction and Tours
Further Exploration

Posts

  • All Posts – The Posts Screen provides the facility to manage all the Posts in a blog. Via this Screen, Posts can be edited, deleted, and viewed. Filtering, and searching, also makes it easy to quickly find Posts matching certain criteria.
  • Add New Post – Opens the Block Editor for the SCE to start a new post
  • Categories – Categories are pre-determined sections that you can use to define sections of your site and group related posts. The default category is “Uncategorized” until you change it in your writing settings. If you think of your site like a book, the categories are like the Table of Contents and the tags are like the terms in the index.
  • Tags – You can assign keywords to your posts using tags. Unlike categories, tags have no hierarchy, meaning there is no relationship from one tag to another.

Note on categories and tags: What’s the difference between categories and tags? Normally, tags are ad-hoc keywords that identify important information in your post (names, subjects, etc) that may or may not recur in other posts, while categories are pre-determined sections. If you think of your site like a book, the categories are like the Table of Contents and the tags are like the terms in the index.

Things to Consider

Media

On WordPress at K, Media consists of the images and files that you upload and use on your website. 

  • Library – All the files you’ve uploaded are listed in the Media Library, with the most recent uploads listed first.
  • Add New Media File – Allows SCEs to upload media files here without creating a post first. There are three options for uploading files: drag and drop one or multiple files, select files, and browser uploader. The Maximum upload file size is 5 MB.
Media Instruction and Tours
Further Exploration
  • Get to Know the Interface
  • Media Processes and Protocols
  • Compressing and Resizing Images

Pages

Pages are similar to posts in that they have a title, body text, and associated metadata, but they are different in that they are not part of the chronological blog stream, kind of like permanent posts. Pages are not categorized or tagged, but can have a hierarchy. You can nest pages under other pages by making one the “Parent” of the other, creating a group of pages. Here at K we have two options to view and manage your list of pages.

  • Pages/Nested Pages- The Pages screen runs a plugin called nested pages that provides a simple and intuitive drag and drop interface for managing the information architecture of your website. You can refer to the toggling the page tree, hiding pages from the tree view, sorting pages, and adding child pages section of the Nested Pages documentation.
  • Default Pages Screen – This was the original view of the Pages Screen; however, to make managing pages more simple, sites at K use the Nested Pages as the primary pages screen.

Further Exploration

  • Restricting access – Some content is not meant for the general public. To restrict access learn how to require members of the K College community to log in.

Forms

At K, we use the WordPress plugin, Gravity Forms to create simple and complex forms where information is collected and allows SCEs to add these forms to their website. Gravity Forms can be used for contact forms, program applications, even registration, surveys, and more.

Subpage options:

  • Forms – The forms list page displays a list of all your forms. From this page you can manage and edit your existing forms and get a quick rundown on basic analytics such as views, number of entries, and the conversation ratio.
  • New Form – This starts the form creation process.
  • Entries – Access the “submissions,” or what Gravity Forms refers to as an entry.
  • Import/Export – A space where you can export your entries, export your form, or import a form to your website.

Further Exploration

  • Gravity Forms – This is a complete list of documentation that you can follow as an SCE.
  • Require Form Login – Editors can restrict access and require users to log into their form.

Comments

You can manage comments made on your site similar to the way you manage posts and other content. Through Screen options you can customize options available to you for moderating comments. Tip: when hovering over a comment you will see more action links or the bulk actions.

  • Comments – Understand the table of comments, filtering options, using selection, actions, and apply and how to edit a comment.

Appearance

  • Themes – The active theme for Kalamazoo College websites is the Gutenberg-child theme
  • Customize – The Customizer allows you to preview changes to your site before publishing them. You can navigate to different pages on your site within the preview. There are edit shortcuts for site identity, header image menus, and widgets.
  • Widgets – Widget Areas are global parts in your site’s layout that can accept blocks. Every website has a right sidebar widget, footer widget, and an inactive widget area. Blocks in the inactive widget area will not be displayed on your website.
  • Menus – From this screen you can: create, edit, and delete menus; add, organize, and modify individual menu items. For K College websites there are two options for theme locations: top and left.
  • Header – The Header option in the Customizer allows you to add an image that will sit atop the website title. For the theme we use for the College, a header the size of 1170 X250 pixels works best.

Profile

Your profile contains information about you (your “account”) as well as some personal options related to using WordPress.

Your username cannot be changed, but you can use other fields to enter your real name or a nickname, and change which name to display on your posts.

Remember to click the Update Profile button when you are finished.

To maintain the quality for our websites at K, the Broken Link Checker is available to primary website Designers and Editors.

Broken Link Checker Instruction and Tours

Guide 2: Elements of Your Website at K

Coming soon!

  • Explain what the out of the box WP looks like for editors (K color palette, posts, pages, widgets, etc.)
  • Supply a screenshot and edit so it highlights various areas for public view (Header, menu, body, right sidebar, and footer)
  • Each site comes with a Home page and Post page/section
  • Posts will also have an uncategorized

WP Interface Tour

Best Practices

Guide 3: Your Block Editor

Now that you have reviewed the WP Admin interface as well as the elements that make up a K website, it’s time to learn the block editor interface!

In the WordPress Block Editor, a block is a single piece of content. Think of them as the literal building blocks of your website. You can add blocks for text, images, embedding video from Vimeo or YouTube, audio, columns, spaces, page breaks, and much more! These resources will teach you how to get started with adding blocks.

Note: You may see some blocks within the resources that do not show up when editing your website. This is intentional since we provide a customized version and not all WordPress websites offer the same blocks.

Guide 4: Website Enhancements

  • Advanced CSS Classes – Explore the CSS classes that allow you to tell the block editor to display a particular block differently than it normally would.
  • Add a calendar feed – Display your events on your website whether you have entered them into the Hornet Hive or another external calendar that offers iCal format feed.
  • News Feeds – Generate automatic listings of the latest news from your own site or another site.
  • Icons – Use Font Awesome icons in your content to help your visitors navigate and engage with your content.
  • iFrame Block – Use the iFrame block to embed content such as tables from PowerBI
  • Maps and Directions – Provide users directions to your building by linking to a Google map, displaying the College campus map, or embedding and linking a Google map.
  • Pop-Ups –
  • Shortcodes – Learn the syntax you need to invoke specific functions for your website.
  • Subscribe Buttons – Invite the K community to subscribe to your posts and receive notifications soon after you publish.

Requirements

Part 1: Maintenance

Broken link checker

Checklist of what to do (refer to moodle)

Storage & Assets

Part 2: Accessibility

Part 3: Images – sourcing, compression, and contrast

  • Copyright free
  • Microsoft Photos + Mac free option
  • Contrast?

Part 3: Images – sourcing, compression, and contrast

  • Might be a good starting point:
    • https://wordpress.com/support/
  • Getting to know your website – Let’s review the different elements that make up a website at K.
  • Publishing Content – Learn the difference between pages and posts and how to edit them.
  • Website Enhancements – Check out the possibilities so we can help you succeed.

Accessibility and Usability for the Web

  • Headings
  • Color contrast
  • Media
  • Hyperlinking
  • Uploaded documents

Questions?

Do you work better with one-on-one coaching? Don’t hesitate to book a meeting with the Web Services Specialist.

Instruction on this page have either been written by the Web Services team or have been adapted from WordPress.com