(This site has been set up specifically to help libraries in the CEF system take advantage of the free hosting plan offered to not-for-profits. While the website can be used for any type of software or website building platform, these instructions cover the use of WordPress. Included are at least 5 free WordPress themes that have been slightly edited to better fit the needs of what most small public libraries wish to accomplish with their sites.)
Edit the Layout
Basically, this means making some minor adjustments to get the site working the way you want. For instance, you need to chose your “front page,” or the page that people see first when they visit the site. This is controlled globally and has nothing to do with the specific theme you choose. It is easy, but the default choice is to have the news items or blog posts front and center on the first page. Many sites such as a library will want to change this.
Then we need to add pages, and be sure they display in the navigational menus properly.
Then we need to set up link categories. This will be important to a library, as we do want to disseminate information after all.
Finally, we need to enable to Widgets that we want to display in the sidebar, if we have a sidebar. It is important not to crowd too much on here, so you just need to become familiar with a few.
A widget is basically a small tool or program that does one specific thing. In this case, it will do something like display a list of pages on your sidebar, display your important links, let you run a small application or put a snippet of text or an image. Look at the sidebar on the main Wilmington site. Most of those items are run by widgets. The Google translate box and mapping boxes are snippets of html placed in a text box. The donate button is A PayPal code we put in a text area. All the links are generated from a link management area, and the drop down menu pf post categories is its own widget. All these can be put on or disabled, and placed in any order we choose.
