On this page
It can be a little daunting building a new website from a blank slate. The following guide is intended to help give you the key information you need to understand to help you build your site.
Online documentation
Complementary to the training sessions available this website offers an extensive series of documentation on how to use our WordPress based website. Here you will find guides relating to pages, post, profiles, menus, the media library, and each of the panels available.
Many of these pages also have useful short videos on how to configure the page or panel.
Additionally, there are additional guides on making sure your content is optimised for search engines, about social media sharing, and more.
Require additional administrators (users) on your site?
Sometimes it can be difficult to manage a website on your own and you want to include members of team or project in the process.
Research.kent
Research.kent makes use of the University’s Single Sign-On (SSO) service. This requires that ALL users must have a kent.ac.uk email address before they can be added to the service and log in.
Other sites
Other WordPress based sites such as kmms.ac.uk and msp.ac.uk do not use SSO and have no restrictions on the type of email required for user registration.
To have people added email helpdesk@kent.ac.uk marking it for the attention of IS Web and Learning Development.
Ensure to include the username, name, and email address of each user you would like added, along with the URL of the website.
Building out your site
Now comes the fun part, setting up your pages, inputting your content, and making it look nice.
The three types of content
When you first login to the dashboard it can look a little daunting, but don’t worry. There are three types of content you will be working with; Pages, Posts, People profiles. These three are listed on the menu on the left side of the dashboard.
These three items define the content that people will see when they visit your website.
Now, lets…
Create some pages
Pages are the main content for your site. These are what you will link from the main menu, homepage, and sidebars, and will contain a mixture of panels showing text, images, cards, KAR publications, and more to make content rich, informative pages.
Pages are a little more complex to build, as they use a series of panels stacked on top of each other, each offering a different style and type of content and functionality. But there are no restrictions on the type of panels and their order. You will find there is a great deal of flexibility enabling you to build your pages just as you require.
Documentation: https://research.kent.ac.uk/documentation/pages/
Publish a news posts
Posts are for news articles or blog posts, and work in the same way as on blogs.kent.ac.uk. They are similar to pages but much more simplified with only a few options to configure. You can publish posts about anything; project updates, forthcoming events / conferences, industry related news, etc.
Documentation: https://research.kent.ac.uk/documentation/posts/
Add a few staff profiles
Staff (people) profiles on research.kent are similar to those on kent.ac.uk. To have people listed via the ‘People panel’ you need to create a profile first. But the nice difference here is that you have the choice of making each profile either a full blown page with information about them, a link to another page such as a profile on kent.ac.uk, or just a static, non-clickable card (useful for showing team members such as PhD students).
Remember, they need a profile setup to appear on the site, but they don’t need a full blown profile.
Documentation: https://research.kent.ac.uk/documentation/posts/
Update your site menu
The main menu at the top of your site is managed centrally with the ‘Menus’ section. This is located within ‘Appearance’ on the dashboard. Just hover your cursor over ‘Appearance’ and you should it listed on the sub menu.
The main menu is already setup, so all you need to do is add and remove items as you wish. The menu is setup to automatically overflow and show a ‘More’ button if there are more menu items than can be shown on the screen.
We mostly use the menu to showcase key internal pages, but you can link out to external pages if desired.
Documentation: https://research.kent.ac.uk/documentation/menus/
Need to crop an image quickly?
Not everyone has Adobe Photoshop installed, nor the time or skills to use it. If you need to quickly crop an image we have a custom built app which should help.
Just follow the link below and you will be able to quickly select an image on your local device, select a pre-defined size to crop too or define your own, crop the image, then download it as a JPG, all in a matter of a few seconds.
https://research.kent.ac.uk/documentation/image-editor/
Showcase any affiliated organisations / partners logos
If your project is affiliated with other institutions / organisations / teams it is possible to include their logo at the bottom of the site, which will appear throughout the site. This is managed within the ‘Partners’ section on the dashboard. Here you can type in the required logo and this will appear on the site, as a clickable link to their website. We already have a large array of organisations to choose from, but we are always adding more. If your required logo is not available let us know and we’ll get it added to your site.
Documentation: https://research.kent.ac.uk/documentation/partners/
Once you’ve finished building the site what next?
All sites setup are marked as non-public. This means that while the site can be viewed by anyone with the URL the site itseld will not be crawled/indexed by search engines such as Google and Bing and so not show in any relevant search results, nor will it appear on the site directory on research.kent.ac.uk.
Check over the site for bugs
Once you have completed building your site and it is ready to go live, drop us an email via helpdesk@kent.ac.uk. We will perform a quick check over the site to ensure there are no broken links and everything looks okay. If we pick up anything amiss we will be in touch to discuss any changes we feel are required.
Do you need analytics for your site?
We can setup a simple to use analytics plugin on your site to enable you to see some stats about the number of users, where they are coming from, and what content they are looking at. Alternatively, if required we can periodically output some data from Google Analytics specific to your site.
Lets make it live
Once the site is ready and you wish for the public to see it we will mark it as ‘Public’. This will ensure it is then listed on research.kent. We will also submit the ‘sitemap’ to Google to ensure it is ‘indexed’ by them as quickly as possible. Be aware that it can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months for search engines to begin showing your site in their results.