Editing your website can be slightly overwhelming when you have no experience with WordPress or similar page builders. WordPress itself has loads of documentation that can help you with this. I recommend getting familiar with the official WordPress documentation when you are planning to work on your website a lot, so you can get the most out of it.

Just to get you started with the basics, I also created some documentation for you that is customized for the type of websites that I deliver.

Getting started with editing your website

First of all, editing your website requires you to login. This can be done when you go to a specific page on your own website. For example, for this site it’s rvdbsolutions.com/wp-login.php. The one exception to this, is when you requested a custom login URL, in which case you will receive the custom URL by e-mail.

Site Editor vs Page Editor

Understanding the difference between the site editor and page editor is important to find your way around editing your website. Most of your content will be edited in the page editor. Parts that are more than one place on your website are usually edited in the site editor. A great example is the site header. It will be shown on (almost) every page of your website, so it would be a terrible idea to have to edit this on every individual page. Instead, we utilize WordPress’ template parts for this.

In the rest of this documentation, pay close attention to the terms used to know where you need to be within your website. I will always specify the editor to use. To get to the site editor, move your mouse over ‘Appearance’ and click on ‘Editor’. To use the page editor, edit any page, post or custom post.

Pages vs Posts

A WordPress website usually consists out of pages and posts. The default post-type ‘post’ is commonly used for blogs or news articles, while websites often have multiple ‘custom post types’, which are like posts but with a different name. ‘Event’ is a common custom post type.

Pages are the ‘common’ or ‘one-of-a-kind’ sections of your website. Examples: contact page, home page, landing pages about individual services (even though you could choose to make ‘Service’ a custom post type) etc.

Editing page and post content of your website

Editing a page or post is done in the page editor. There are so many options within the page editor, that I won’t be going through all of them. In fact, I will explain the global options, as for detailed information about the available core blocks I would refer you to the WordPress documentation.

Core blocks

There is the first term that I should address straightaway. With the term “core blocks”, I’m referring to the default WordPress blocks that are available. They each have their own set of settings to change the content and style. Some of the attributes that could be among these settings are: padding, margin, font-size, border, backgrounds, and much, much more. I would advise you to create a new concept page and play around with the default WordPress blocks to find out what’s possible.

Custom blocks

Besides the standard WordPress blocks, it’s possible to build custom blocks. This is usually the case when RvdB Solutions creates your theme, because even though WordPress comes with a lot of very useful blocks, to give your website a unique feel, custom blocks can go a long way. Look at it as if it’s LEGO: you can build beautiful sets with regular blocks, but the really good sets often have a custom brick made just for that set.

Custom blocks can also have most of the core block settings available. Besides that, the power behind custom blocks is also the custom fields that can be attached to it. That way, your unique building pieces can have unique settings they require to add unique functionalities.

Editing metadata of your posts and pages on your website

Metadata is the information for a post or page that can be utilized throughout your website. Think about a featured image, an excerpt, custom field, categories and much more. How to edit the most common ones and when to use them is explained in detail below.

When you are editing a page or post with the sidebar on the right side of the editor open, you’ll see two tabs: one tab saying page, post or the name of the current custom post type, and one tab saying ‘block’, referring to the currently selected block. The first tab, I will refer to as the page settings sidebar. This is where you find most of the meta attributes.

Featured Image

The featured image is what can make the post pop when presented on other pages. Also, I will most often create a post template utilizing the featured image, so it’s a good habit to always set one for each post. Some extra advise: choose an image that won’t lose it’s value when cropped and never use images with text in them that is supposed to be readable.

You can set, replace or remove the featured image in the page settings sidebar all the way at the top.

Excerpt

The post excerpt is a short summary of the content. Usually you should stick to one or two short sentences, but there are situations where you could choose to add more text to the excerpt. My advise: always follow the advise of your designer or SEO specialist. The excerpt is often used in post query displayed on another page, as a short teaser to make the visitor read more. In some single-post templates, it might even be used as the opening paragraph of the content. When I build you a custom theme, I will always let you know exactly where the excerpt is applied.

You can set, edit or remove the excerpt in the page settings sidebar, right bellow the featured image. By default, the excerpt is only available for the default post post-type. Support can be added for pages and any custom post type. When your site is build by RvdB Solutions, your custom post types will all support an excerpt.

Taxonomies (categories, tags and custom taxonomies)

By default, there are two taxonomies available to the post post-type only: categories and tags. Both of them, as well as any custom taxonomies, can be assigned to any page or post-type that supports the taxonomy. Support for a taxonomy should only be added with a purpose, which is often categorizing and filtering posts. A great example: an ‘event’ custom post type can have a custom taxonomy ‘city’, allowing query filters to be build that allow filtering events on city, which also allows for a performance friendly way to create separate pages per city.

When your theme is build by RvdB Solutions, we will decide together on what taxonomies you need and could benefit you. Editing which taxonomy will be available for what post type is one thing you don’t need to worry about, this will all be set for you. I will however tell you more about how to add, edit and assign terms.

When custom taxonomies are available, you will be briefed about where to find them. I will only tell you about the default category and tag taxonomies. Even though you can quite easily add new categories and tags while editing a single post, I strongly advise you to always prepare the categories and tags you choose to use. For this, move your mouse over ‘Posts’ and select either ‘categories’ or ‘tags’. This is where you’ll be able to see a list of all existing terms and add new terms. Often, when your theme is developed by RvdB Solutions, you will be able to add more information to the terms than just a title. By allowing SEO content to be added for each term, a category page can be optimized as a landing page. This is the main reason I strongly advise you to prepare the terms, as when you add the term while editing a single post, the term page won’t have the required content.

Some last strong advise on terms: always double check for typos and existing terms. I’ve worked on many websites that had categories like ‘pants’, ‘Pants’ and ‘pantes’ or similar duplication typo situations. Cleaning up such a mess is time that could be spend on growing your business instead of repairing it. If you are already too far gone, it’s worth spending time cleaning it up, as search engines won’t like the duplicated content.

Custom Fields

As the heading suggests, these are fields that are custom to your theme. For that reason, I can’t get into a lot of details in this general editing guide. I will break down some of the types of custom fields and the possible locations of them.

Custom fields added using Advanced Custom Fields will usually be in 1 of 2 locations: inside the page settings sidebar, or right under the content editor. The fields are grouped in field-groups and come in many types. Just some of the much used field types are:

• Paragraph (like the block of text right above this line)
• Heading (like the ‘custom fields’ text above this section)
• List (like this very element)
• Number (when the value must be a valid number)
• Button Group (when the editor has a small amount of options)
• Select (when the editor has a bigger amount of options)
• Repeater Field (allows a group of other fields to be repeated, for example to add multiple images and headings to a slider)

There are many other fields available, which should all be very intuitive to use. During a website training, I will of course explain the important fields for your custom theme.

Editing website template parts

All template parts are edited in the site editor. A custom website can have a collection of various template parts, but this documentation will be limited to two main template parts: the site header and the site footer. Usually, this would also include one or more navigation areas.

Header

Editing your header is mostly different for each custom header, but there are often some common areas. There will most likely be one or more navigation areas, which I will get into later on in this section. Besides that, the site logo is usually shown in the header as well. This can easily be edited when in the site editor by clicking the logo and click on ‘replace’. Note that at the time of writing this documentation, it also allows you to set the logo to be the sites icon (favicon). Often, the site logo can be a wider version of a logo, while the site icon should be on a 1-by-1 ratio. When changing your site logo, be aware of this.

Other common areas in the header are a search bar and possibly a call to action. If your theme includes them, you will be briefed about how to change them.

Footer

For the footer it’s more or less the same as for the header: mostly navigation areas and possibly a call to action. The call to action would be custom to your theme, so you’ll receive a custom briefing. Navigation coming up:

Navigation

Editing navigation areas is fairly easy once the menu’s are setup, which should be done by your theme’s developer. For each area that holds a group of links, there will be a navigational menu. When you have 3 footer columns, they will most likely be called Footer Nav 1, Footer Nav 2 and Footer Nav 3. You don’t have to worry about the names though: when editing the template parts, you can just click on the menu or menu item you want to change.

You can set custom link or have a direct link to an existing page. Depending on your theme, you might have the option to select a call to action button or other options as well. The navigational editing experience should be straightforward, but I will always show you how it works during a website training.

Editing website page templates

I usually build a website in a way you won’t have to touch this area of your site editor. The main reason is that this affects a big part of your website, a little mistake can break the entire site. For this reason, I will not add documentation about editing the templates themselves.

If you are tech savvy and want me to show you how the site editor works for templates, of course I can help you out.