Dashboard: Once you login to your site (at yourdomainname.com/wp-login.php or the login link in the lower right of your site), you will be at the WordPress dashboard. Your WordPress dashboard is your primary interface to your WordPress website; it summarizes your posts, comments, inbound links, and also includes a to-do list for you to keep track of blog post ideas and other online marketing tasks.
Each of the “modules” on your dashboard are draggable so that you can arrange them in your desired order to bring the more important modules to the top. To move them, just click and hold down the title of a module and drag it to its new location!
WordPress: At a high level, there are a few things you should know about WordPress.org. First of all, it’s the underlying software that your website is built on top of. Second, the software is completely open source — meaning no one makes a dime directly from improving and enhancing WordPress. But the fact that’s it’s open source means there are thousands and thousands of developers writing code against WordPress on a daily basis. There are three primary components to a WordPress website; the core WordPress.org software, a theme, and plugins.
Basic Functionality: While WordPress is known primarily as a blogging platform, in reality, it’s a full scale content management system capable of handing content of any kind.
The main thing you should be doing is creating blog posts on a regular basis. There are a few primary things you’ll need to know how to do. Create links, embedding videos, and uploading images.
- Inserting links – All you have to do to add a link within the content of a post or page is to highlight the text that you want to link, click the chain icon in your editor bar, grab the URL you want to link to and paste it into the URL field, and then click “add link”. Here’s a screenshot, or more about creating links can be found here.
- Uploading photos – You’ll need to use the media uploader to add photos, which is located right next to “Upload/Insert” at the top of your visual editor. Here is a screenshot detailing the placement of the insert image button.
- Embedding videos – we use the Vipers Video Quicktags plugin, which inserts a few additional buttons in your visual editor bar. Simply click the specified button depending on which video service you are using and copy the URL of the video into the text box before clicking okay. Here is a screenshot that shows where to find these buttons.
Initial Content Setup & Pages
We load your predesigned site with a number of pages we recommend using on your site. Most of you will use them, but you may delete them if you wish. There are 2 important pages to note though that don’t work like common pages, and each of them has their own page template. While you can change the SEO settings, do NOT change the page template on these two pages.
- Home – The home page of your site is a static page from a code perspective. Editing the body text of the “home” page will not put that text onto the home page of your site.
- Market Stats – This is your default landing page with market data from Altos Research and a “subscribe” button at the bottom.
Do NOT, under any circumstances, create “pages” in your site with the following names: Listings, Communities, Testimonials, Associates, Videos, IDX. Doing so will break those components of your site.
Custom Post Types: Since we don’t want to treat all your content the same, your website has a variety of custom post types to allow for flexibility in displaying and inputting various types of information contained in your website. Below is a help page on navigating each one of them:
Standard Plugins: As part of the setup process, we setup a few WordPress plugins that you will use regularly. Below is a help page on navigating each one of the plugins that we install on each site:
Complete list of supported plugins.
If you have other questions about WordPress plugins, please ask in the Geek Estate forum.
Importing Content: You can of course add content from other websites to your Virtual Results website. However, there are a couple things to note:
- Please don’t copy/paste from Microsoft Word UNLESS you are using the special “Paste from Word” option in your visual editor. To see this option, you’ll need to click the “Show/Hide Kitchen Sink” button to display the 2nd row of visual editor options. Screenshot.
- If you’d like us to help import content from another WordPress blog, please let us know.
Admin: There are a few admin options you may wish to change. Your navigation menu can be changed from the “menus” section under “appearance”. You can add or remove pages to the primary “MainNav” menu. You can also add or remove widgets from the sidebar if you wish. Please use the “Main Bottom Sidebar” widget, as the top sidebar widget has different styling that may cause your widget to not display properly. On the topic of widgets, note that adding every last widget on the planet is not going to help your conversion rate — in fact, doing so will lower your conversion rate. Remember, if you are doing something for any reason aside from “traffic” and “conversion”, you shouldn’t be doing it at all.
Altos Research: Altos Research is part of your monthly website package. The Altos staff is available to help. Below are some resources for you to take advantage of:
Diverse Solutions: dsIDXpress, the IDX plugin from Diverse Solutions, comes with every predesigned website that works (unless you belong to a MLS not covered by Diverse). Make sure to learn more about the product so that you can take advantage all that it offers:
For those with a monthly package including dsSearchAgent, make sure to configure your registration and email notification settings.
Additional Readings: Blogging and online marketing is a broad topic. We’ve compiled some additional readings you may find valuable depending on what you are looking to learn more about.
- Recommended resources on a wide variety of topics from Virtual Results
- WordPress Questions, Answers, Videos, and Resources
If you have further questions, please ask them in the Virtual Results portion of Geek Estate Pro.
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