A Guide To Using Your Website

Welcome to WordPress! You’ll find you can edit most aspects of your website yourself, once you get familiar it is quick and easy.

Most of those plugins, though particularly the premium plugins, will evolve overtime. We hope that the website Guide page is a helpful place to centralise How To information about all of the elements that make the website work. It is inevitable that over time some instructions on the Guide page will become outdated.

As a rule we aim to update the Guide page whenever we notice such changes occur and updates are necessary. The Guide page is an editable page like any other, so please make it yours and use it to record any operational changes you notice too.

If you want to jump right in, here are your quick start essentials

  1. Staging Site: learn how to create your Staging Site – this is a copy of your website allowing you to practice changes without affecting anything on your live site.
  2. Page Builder Intro: watch the introductory video about how to use the Elementor.
  3. Key Info Guide: we’ve put together a key information guide below –  to let you know how to change the words and photos on your website yourself.

Anytime you need web questions answered, or need help completing tasks on your website, remember you can email us at service@om4.com.au

Accordion Content

Take 5 minutes to check things out

Take 5 minutes to regularly review your website operations to reduce the risk of errors affecting your business.

What are the critical processes on your website that could impact your customers and your income?

Are you anticipating stock outages? Is your payment gateway working and are shop payments completing successfully? If you have booking systems or enquiry forms, are you receiving all of your customer requests?

What regular testing schedule (monthly, weekly, daily) is best for your business?

Know the important ways customers interact with you through your website and test those pathways. Set regular diary entries for testing and assign the tasks to a team member to complete.

Are there unlikely or irregular events you might need to prepare for?

Do you have important though irregular events that are essential to your business? Are there seasonal peak ordering periods or do you send occasional news blasts with special offers? Anticipate the impact of these events and be ready for sudden increases in website activity.

Critical Take 5 Checklist

Step 1: Is the website up to date? (dashboard check)

Step 2: Does the website present correctly? (visual check)

Step 3: Can the website process enquiry forms and notify you? (form check)

Step 4: Can the website process online payments and notify you? (payment check)

Step 5: Are your signups and social links correct? (newsletter subscriber and social media check)

Squash Spam: Akismet premium spam filtering for forms and comments.

Advanced Forms: Gravity Forms for premium editable forms.

Powerful Information Filtering: Toolset plugin allows for custom site databases and filtering.

Friendly Dashboard: Admin Columns Pro for configurable dashboards.

WooCommerce Premium Shipping Extension: Table Rate Shipping.

To update the main areas of content on your website:

  • Pages: using your website menu browse to the page you want to edit. Use the Page Builder item in the top menu to edit the page. Hover over each element on the page and click the spanner icon of each module to edit.
  • Blog: add/edit blog posts and blog categories using Dashboard, Posts. Make sure to set a Featured Image
  • Menus: add new items and reorder using Dashboard, Appearance, Menus
  • Forms: edit forms using Dashboard, Forms. Click an existing form to edit.

Staging

From your WordPress dashboard, use the WPEngine, Staging item to copy your current production website across to your staging site. Get the link and login into it using your normal user id. You can make changes in Staging without affecting production. Use it as a practice ground, or if you want to make a set of changes, you can then copy the Staging site back over to Production.

You can also use Staging to try out new plugins or test updates before they are run on your Live site

Plugin Updates

Your WordPress website requires regular updates for plugins. It is recommended you know how to create backup points so you can restore your Live website to a prior backup if needed. You can also create a Staging site (a complete copy of your Live website) so you can try out new plugins or test updates before they are run on your Live site.

  • Updates: Keep your website up to date – visit Dashboard, Updates regularly and make sure you are running the latest versions of WordPress, plugins and your theme.
  • Backup Points: Create a backup point before running updates using Dashboard, WP Engine, User Portal (or just login to my.wpengine.com) and create a manual backup point. You can Restore to this backup point if needed.
  • Test After Updates: After making changes such as updating WordPress, plugins or your theme, you should check your site still operates normally, particularly for your important website functions such as enquiry forms, online sales or service/product pages.

The process of updating theme and plugins is described in full in this article Updating Themes and Plugins, step by step in the Staging Environment.

If you are updating the WooCommerce plugin, it is suggested that you first update all other plugins, then update WooCommerce last.

It is recommended you regularly, and definitely after upgrading your website, purchase a product from your website. Make a full payment so you can see the payment gateway working correctly, and all email notifications work correctly. You can use the test coupon code to reduce the payment amount by 99%.

How to article and video

Does your website use forms (like a Contact form)?

If you do, we recommend a regular testing schedule to ensure your forms continue working as expected. It is also sensible to test before any one off promotions or events that could bring extra customer activity to your website.

Your website uses the Gravity Forms plugin. Gravity forms allows you to have a confirmation message appear after a web visitor completes a form, and it allows email notifications about the form submission to be sent to one or more of your own email addresses. Some websites are set up to send a confirmation email to the web visitor too.

How to test a form

  • Log out of your website and complete at least one form on your website as if you are a customer or visitor.
  • Notice the confirmation page or message that appears.
  • Login and check that the website has registered the email in the Email Log, and in the Gravity Forms entries for that form.
  • Notice the email addresses that received notification of the message.

Is everything operating as expected? If you have any concerns or questions please contact service@om4.com.au

Check your website Email Log

  • Login to Dashboard, Email Log
  • Check that your test email has been logged by the website

The function of this log is to record each email sent to or from you website.

Check the Gravity Form Entries screen

  • Login to Dashboard, Forms
  • Hover over the name of the form you tested and click on Entries in the submenu that appears
  • Check that your test email has been logged by the website

Do you offer a subscription form to join a news mailing list?

You will be using Campaign Monitor or MailChimp to create your newsletter. The subscription form may come from your newsletter provider, or from Gravity Forms.

Either way, testing is similar.

How to test a form

  • Log out of your website and complete the newsletter subscriptions form as if you are a customer or visitor.
  • Notice the confirmation page or message that appears.
  • Notice the email addresses that received notification of the message (if applicable)
  • Login to your newsletter provider and check that your test subscription has appeared in the correct subscriber list.

Is everything operating as expected? If you have any concerns or questions please contact service@om4.com.au

Prepare the following types of images to the required sizes before uploading to your website:

  • Home Slides Images: 2400 by 1000 px
  • Our Projects Images: 600 by 600 px
  • Our Blog Images: 600 by 600 px
  • Advocacy Images: 400 by 400 px

WordPress Image Editor: Crop or resize images after uploading using Dashboard, Media Library and clicking the Edit Image link. There are videos showing how to use this editor under Dashboard, Manual, Videos.

Advanced Image Editor: Edit images before uploading using the Canva image editor.

Learn more about image optimisation: How Image Optimisation affects your website

Your website uses the WordPress CMS with a front-end Page Builder.

To learn more about your Page Builder:

Saved Rows and Saved Modules

These are the saved rows and modules available to reuse on your site.

All Saved Templates

Page Templates

Section Templates

Global Widget

Notice some rows and/or modules are global. A global row/module also appears as a gold colour when hovered over in Page Builder. Edits to a global row/module on one page will automatically appear anywhere the row/module appears on the website. All other rows/modules are a blue colour and are standard. Edit a standard row/module and the change appears only on the page on which you’re working.

Please Note: Do not delete global rows

Analytics

If you have elected to have Google Analytics and Google Search Console configured for your website, you can review the details as follows:

 

 

This site features view on these pages:

 

You can edit the views: here

Direct link to view settings page here

The Our Projects page conditionally shows the interior or exterior image based on whether the user has filtered by the Interior category or not. A custom JS snippet on the content template’s view block handles this.

The exterior image is shown by default, but if the user filters by Interior then the interior image is shown instead.

Font Family
Archivo
Primary Font Weight: 600
Secondary Font Weight: 400

System Colours
Primary: #222220
Secondary: #85AE93
Text: #FFFFFF
Accent: #85AE93

Custom Colours
Accent Text: #98A7AC
Full Black: #000000
Light Grey: #E9E9E9

Button
Normal State
Button Colour: #85AE93
Text Colour: #21211F

Hover State
Button Colour: #85AE93
Text Colour: #FFFFFF

How To Videos

Login & Change Password
Edit an Existing Blog Post (Houzz)
Add & Edit a Project
W26982 – Updating Project Page Titles & Feature Image