The Programs page should fill in a few remaining gaps not covered in the Home page section. Once you’ve looked at both of these, you should have a pretty good idea of how to edit nearly any page on the site.
The first section is a row of columns. As mentioned on the Home page, these can be tricky to navigate, so let’s look at how one block is embedded in another is embedded in another is embedded in another (phew!) and how to modify each part.
First, you can click on the text and button blocks to make edits to them. Pretty simple so far:
Sidenote: Updating PDF links
The registration buttons happen to link to PDF registration forms. Linking to PDFs is one of the more ‘clunky’ processes here, so I’ll tell you how I do it.
First, I would open the Dashboard in a new, second tab. From there, I would visit the Media > Add New page:
Here, I can drag and drop a PDF into the designated box to upload one. Once it’s finished uploading, I would click Edit:
Now, I would want to copy the File URL to my clipboard – select it and either right click and pick ‘Copy’ or use the keyboard shortcut (ctrl + c (Windows); ⌘ + c (Apple)):
Go ahead and close the tab. We’re nearly done. Back in your Programs page (or whichever), paste the link as your button URL – right click and pick ‘Paste’ or use the keyboard shortcut (ctrl + v (Windows); ⌘ + v (Apple)):
End of sidenote, back to editing:
Click on the outside of these blocks, on the image behind them and you will see the text and buttons are inside a “Cover” block. This is where the background image comes from. The Cover block basically gives you an eye-catching section where you can have a background image with any number of child blocks within it. If you want to edit the background image, there are two ways. I think the first one is easier. With the cover block selected, click the pencil icon up top and you will be able to pick a new image:
Or, you can click Clear Media in the block settings and then pick a new image in the block itself:
Below that, in the settings, you can edit the overlay colour as well.
The cover block is within a column. Click the dotted line just outside of this to select the column (as discussed on the Home page’s first column block). Finally, the containing Columns block in which all three columns live. Because it’s full-width here, it can be harder to select, so here is another way to navigate ‘nested’ blocks:
You can select the Block Navigation icon from the toolbar above to bring up a sort of family tree that gives you a representation of the parent and child blocks in whatever area you’re currently working in:
Select Columns there and you will be able to edit the containing Columns block.
Click on any image on the gallery and you’ll see you have some self-explanatory ways to remove images (X), quickly move them left or right (<, >), or drag and drop new images to upload them:
What’s less obvious is that it’s actually easier to move items around by clicking the Media Library button and then, if it’s not active already, clicking on Edit Gallery on the side:
From here, you can drag and drop images into whatever order you want in a much quicker, easier way. Finally, if you want to change the gallery’s number of columns, you have that option on the side of the page back in your editor:
Let’s start with the Home page. Click its name or hover over it and click edit to begin editing the page:
We are using the almost brand new WordPress block editor on this site. In the section on Adding Pages, we’ll walk through adding new blocks and give a better introduction to what ones are available. For now, we’re just going to worry about modifying the ones that are already on your existing pages.
At any point, if you want to view the page, click View Page up top. Now, you may want to do this in a new tab if you are in the middle of working on something, which you can do by either right clicking on it or holding ctrl or ⌘ when clicking it (Windows vs. Apple):
To preview your work in progress, click the preview link:
The very first item is not actually part of the page content – it’s the page title:
Hopefully you won’t need to edit this ever or at all, but if you do, be aware that it will change references to the title throughout the site, such as in the Menu or in your list of pages. It may even change the URL to the page, which could be a problem. So edit it when needed, but leave it intact when this can be avoided.
The first block creates a carousel using a third-party plugin. Here in the page editor, all you have to do is select which slider you want to show. But let’s take a quick look at how you could update this carousel if you wanted to. In the main admin menu, select Soliloquy:
From here, you would hover over the slider that appears at the top of your homepage – JAC profile pics – and click Edit. Once in here, you can drag and drop new photos you want to feature, select ones that have already been uploaded (“Select From Other Sources"), and/or remove photos that are already in use (click X on the photo in question).
The next section is just a styled paragraph:
Click anywhere inside and edit the text like you would in, e.g., Word or Google Docs. You have some styling options, such as bold and italic. Just select the text you want and click the appropriate icon.
There are additional, block-wide styling options along the righthand side of the screen (provided you are on a medium-to-large sized screen; on mobile, it would be different). Here you can set the text size (from presets or a custom size), and/or background and foreground colours (again, from presets or a custom colour):
A quick note, if that settings panel on the right hand side isn’t showing for you when you have a block selected, click its icon up top – the gear icon:
The next block is just a ‘Separator’ – a line that is useful in breaking up content and communicating to users where one section ends and another begins:
The separator has some modest settings you can try, though this site hasn’t made use of them at the time of this writing:
Deleting blocks
Let’s say you wanted to get rid of this (or any block, for that matter). Just click on it and hit delete. Made a mistake? Use your standard “Undo” shortcut (ctrl + z or ⌘ + z, Windows vs. Apple).
Moving blocks
Let’s say you just wanted to move it up or down. Just click those arrows on the lefthand side in the appropriate direction.
Other options (duplicating, e.g.)
There are a few more options on every block. Just click the menu option (three dots at righthand side) to access these:
Next is a columns block. These can be the trickiest to navigate, and I’ll explain why in a moment. Editing within a column is easy enough though. Here, let’s say you want to update the video being shown. Just click on the video and then click the pencil icon to edit the YouTube URL that the video ‘lives’ at:
Incidentally, there are empty columns on either side just to reduce the width of the video so that it doesn’t get too large – that’s why this section is the way it is.
The tricky part can be modifying the block. Not the column content itself, but the section that creates the columns. For example, you might want to delete the whole section or maybe change the number of columns – this is when you’d need to modify the block. Here’s what you would need to do.
First, let’s say you haven’t selected anything yet. You might see something like this:
When you hover over an element or a column, you should see an indication that an item is clickable, such as the line here:
Click on it and you should see something like this:
See that dotted line surrounding the whole section? Click that and you should now be able to modify the entire block. Now you can change its appearance, whether adjusting its width or the number of columns, or delete or move the whole thing thing:
The next sections are just more columns containing text (including headers, which let you pick what level heading) and a pullquote (which is editable in quite a similar way to the paragraph option above). You should be comfortable with these by now.
In between the following headers, we wanted a little empty space to spread things out for good flow. You can edit the size of this (or delete or so forth) if you want:
Next we have a block for the form from the WPForms plugin. Like the Soliloquy slider, this is a third-party plugin block, and if you want to edit the form you would select WPForms from the menu:
As of this writing, there is only the one form in use, the newsletter signup form. And, most likely, it’s not going to be modified often or perhaps even ever. But if you do want to edit it, here’s how: Once you've selected it, you will see a variety of field types along the side that you can add. You can drag and drop any of those into place on the form, and then click on it to set its specific options:
There are a few buttons near the bottom of the page. When you click on one, you’ll see you can edit the button text and the linked URL in the block itself, and set a number of options and styles in the panel along the side:
The last section on the home page is for custom HTML, to add a ‘code snippet’ provided by Twitter to embed a Twitter feed. You’ll rarely need a custom HTML block except for instances like this, where you are embedding a block of code provided by an external service provider. There’s no customization available for this block, since there‘s no reason to be. It just outputs the rendered version of whatever code you input:
How to edit existing pages of the website.
In this section, we’re going to look at how to edit pages on your site.
From the dashboard menu, select Pages to be redirected to a list of all the pages on your site:
You’ll now be at a list of all the pages on your site, which can be in various states, such as page drafts. These are pages that are available for you to edit and update and so on, but are not (yet) available to the public. We are just going to worry about some of the pages that are already live.
One quick note: need to delete a page? Quickly change its status (from Published to Draft, e.g.)? From your list of pages, hover over the one you want to modify and hit Trash or Quick Edit for those options:
