At Pagemaster we want you be successful in your online marketing. We create websites and provide you training to see you succeed. This post is part of our series from our Site Training Workbook.
This window will become very familiar to you the more you work with your Site. Editing Pages looks very similar to editing Posts and other forms of content on your Site. Having a good understand of what is available to you from this window will take you far.
Title Bar
At the top is a field to enter the Title of your Page. This should be simple and descriptive.
Permalink
Directly under the title bar you find the permalink, and the option to Edit it. The permalink is simply the link to the page that WordPress creates. By default it is based on the name of the page, and doesn’t need to be changed. However, if you’d like to edit it, to make it shorter or more memorable for instance, you can do that here by clicking Edit, changing the editable portion to your preference, then clicking Update.
Content Editor
Below, you find a big area called the Content Editor. This area lets you create and update the content of your page, including adding images, links and more. If you have used Microsoft Word or another word processor, the buttons and options available here will be familiar to you (such as bold, italics, lists, indentation, etc.).
Styles are also available, and defined to match your chosen theme. The Format drop down list lets you select basic text styles like Heading 2 that will format your text consistently across your Site. Making use of Styles is a great way to add interest and structure to your content while staying within the design of your chosen theme.
Publish Widget
The Publish area to the right lets you Publish your content (if it is new), or Update it. You can also choose to save it as a draft, or Preview your content, as it will look on the front end of your site.
This widget includes options to change the status of a Page or Post (for example, make it a Draft so that it comes off of your site, without being deleted), to change the Visibility of your Page or Post (who can view it), and even alter the Publish Date (you can even choose a future date if you want to create content now, when you have the time, but publish it on Monday, for example).
Page Attributes
This widget lets you organize the Page you are creating, and even assign a special template (way to display the Page).
Parent determines where this Page is filed. For instance, if this is the Contact Page, you may want to choose About the Author as its parent. This means that organizationally, the page will be stored within/beneath About the Author. This plays out practically in a couple of ways, most notably in the URL (web address) for your new page. The above example would change the URL from something like http://www.mypagemastersiteswebsite.com/contact/ to something like http://www.mypagemastersiteswebsite.com/about-the-author/contact.
This does NOT determine where the page shows up in the Site’s Navigation Menu, because PageMaster Sites users WordPress Menu features to give you total control over how your sites navigation menu displays. While this offers more control, it does mean that you have to remember to add a new page to your Site’s menu manually (we’ll walk you through that in another tutorial, but it happens under Appearance/Menus, and not here on the Page Editor window.
Template lets you choose how your Page is displayed. PageMaster Sites do not make use of multiple Page templates by default, except for some that will be set up for you, so you needn’t worry about this option.
Order is not used, as your Site’s navigation menu is manually created.
Page SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and basically refers to any effort on your part to make your website easier to find by search engines, and to improve the ranking of your site on search engines. Essentially, you want search engines to find your site easily because the sooner your site comes up for a user, the more likely they are to visit your site. There are many things you can do related to SEO, and the good news is PageMaster Sites have a lot of built in functionality to handle SEO. That being said, you can optimize almost every piece of content on your site for search engines. This Page SEO widget lets you fill in a Document Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords that search engines look for. Filling these in for each Page and Post on your site can help your site’s overall SEO, and if you have the time to do it, it’s a good idea.
Page Stylesheet
The Hybrid Theme that PageMaster Sites Themes are built upon allows you to assign a special stylesheet to control the look of every additional page. You won’t be using this feature, so there is no need to worry about it.
Discussion
You can choose to allow comments, or not, on each individual piece of content on your site. If your site has commenting turned on, comments will be allowed everywhere by default. You may want to allow comments on Posts (your blog), but not on Pages. Here is where you can turn them off or on. The checkbox for trackbacks and pingbacks basically decides whether or not to include links from other websites to your content as part of the discussion on that Page or Post.
Revisions
This shows us all previous saved versions of the given Page or Post. This is helpful if you make changes that you don’t want to keep, or if you want to restore an earlier version of a page. You can click one of the dated versions to view and/or restore that version.
Shareaholic
Shareaholic is a social sharing plugin we use on PageMaster Sites. This creates a set of buttons under each Page or Post to share your content with popular sites like Twitter or Facebook.
Screen Options and Help
Don’t forget that the Edit Page screen like most other WordPress Admin screens offers Screen Options and Help in the upper right of the screen. These let you set up the Edit Page screen more to your liking (by enabling or disabling certain widgets), or get additional help with it.
Widgets can also be dragged around the screen until it suits your working style best.
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