 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. You can always watch the show later. We record the show every week, so you can watch it later at your convenience. I'll show you at the end of today's show where all of our archives are. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in anything we have on the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the State Agency for Libraries, similar to your state library. We provide services to all types of libraries in the state, so we have shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, museums, archives, corrections really are only criteria that it's something to do with libraries, something that they're cool that they're doing, something we think they could be doing. We have guest speakers that come in to talk about things they're doing at their library. We also have Nebraska Library Commission staff come in to talk about things, services and programs we do with the Library Commission. But once a month, the last Wednesday of every month is Pretty Sweet Tech Day, yay. And that is when Amanda Sweet, our technology innovation librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission comes on and talks to us about something techie. So if you're a tech person, this is definitely the show to keep an eye on every month. She's always here the last Wednesday of the month. And today we're going to be talking about WordPress, a favorite topic of many people who do things on the internet. And apparently they did a whole bunch of updates and changes recently. A mess of them. And people over the edge. Lost their minds. It happens, change can be good, it's okay. And so Amanda's going to tell us how we can deal with that and do some WordPress templates using Elementor, which I do not know at all myself. So I'm going to, I'm very interested to hear all about this. So go ahead and take it away, Amanda. And so first off, if you've been using WordPress, you'll probably know that templates are a thing. They have been a thing and they're going to be a thing. And so the main, what I'm going to kind of talk about here is, is you, if you've been using templates, what's new about them and how is the editor changing yet again? And we'll go over what is full site editing and how is WordPress kind of shifting over to the direction that they're going into their editor. And you should probably know that Elementor is a plugin that is not like a natural part of WordPress. It's an addition for its added features that kind of make it more customizable and more, you can do a lot more stuff with it. The traditional WordPress editor, if you didn't already know, is called Gutenberg. And Gutenberg, they are adding more and more features to it. And it seems like they're shifting over to more of an Elementor style so that it's more customizable without driving people insane. And you can actually make templates using Gutenberg, but you can make templates using Elementor too. The only difference is basically how you add them to your page and the level of different things that you can change on each one of them. And then, so I'm going to walk you through the Elementor templates that I have made already. I'll walk you through some of the different ways that you can customize them to make your own, change colors, change padding, change style, change design, and how these Elementor templates are actually better for responsive design. And responsive design for those who aren't familiar are when you open up a web page on a tablet versus a desktop versus a mobile device, you have to change the layout a little bit so that it's actually readable and usable across all different formats. And Elementor gives you greater control over that responsive design. And it'll make it way easier and less of a headache to make sure that your design looks good across all devices. And I'll give you an example of what that means using one of our templates. And then once I've shown you just what already exists that I've made, I'll run you through the process of how to make your own templates just from start to finish and how to share them out with the world if you so choose. That's the part that seems intimidating to me, but hopefully it's not. It's not too bad. And so let's just dig into, first off, in order to understand why these templates have changed and what kind of what you're getting into, it helps to understand full site editing. So there was a time in WordPress where you would have to go into the page section to update the little main section content of your page. Then you might have to go into the widget and appearance section to go change the sidebar, like what appears on the right-hand side of your page. And then you'd go into another section to change the footer area of your website, which is what appears at the bottom usually contains your contact information and links to other helpful resources. Full site editing is shifting over so that it uses a block editing system across the whole mess. So I can now make layouts that don't even use a separate sidebar. It's all edited and created in the same section. And to give an idea of what that would look like, I'm going to close this. Go in here and go to, so to give, if you aren't familiar with WordPress, this visual will kind of help you understand the different sections of this page. So right up here, you have your header and your menu. And for the most part, this is probably going to be not as customizable using that full page editor, but what's down below is where your main content would appear and where your sidebar would appear. And my computer has been taking a hot minute to load everything. So this would be, I love to fix that link. But so on the right hand side here would be where your sidebar is going to show up. And I know that Alliance actually uses that sidebar system. So this would be your sidebar. And the full block editing will basically just let you do all of this using your main content editor. Nice. And then you don't have to mess around going to three different spots to change stuff. And you can also even throw in your footer in that same editing system if you so choose. And it just way less of a headache. And it just all uses that drag and drop block system. So you don't have to just makes life easier. You can still do it this old way if you want to, but you can also get the same appearance using the templates. And I'll mention here, because I don't think you mentioned before just in case anyone's wondering that Nebraska libraries on the web site that Amanda went to, this is a service that we the commission Amanda specifically offer, providing free WordPress based websites to public libraries in Nebraska. So if you're a public library in Nebraska and interested in having your own website, if you have one you want to change or you're doing the first time, reach out to Amanda and she can get you set up with that. We've done shows about that specifically before, but that's just a quick little patient wondering. And that's a good point to mention. I forgot to mention that. And then so the reason that I actually use Elementor on top of the actual WordPress installation is like I said, it gives you more control over the responsive layout. It gives you a lot more control over customizing the actual block. If you were to actually go into the regular standard Gutenberg editor and go into any one of your different pages, I'll show you like a side by side comparison of what that would actually look like. And I'm going to go in here. So in the this that I'm going to show you now is the traditional Gutenberg editor. Oh, this was a bad page because I hand coded it. But but I can still show you. So when you hit on the plus sign and add into any one of these little block options, you can just drag it over and it'll add down at the bottom here. Now your customizable settings and the traditional Gutenberg editor up here on this right hand side, which is in the block section. And then you can click over to adjust your page settings on this left hand side. So remember what this setting looks like. It lets you change the color, the text setting, the font that's being used. And that's pretty much all it's going to let you change unless you want to manually hand code something, which some people do. Some people don't. I don't know. But you're you're somewhat limited. But when you go into the edit with Elementor, I'm going to leave the page because I'm not actually going to save any of these changes. And pretty much to get into that separate Elementor plugin, it is just a button click once it's installed. And it'll take a second to load. It usually goes faster when I close the other tabs in here. So then I'm going to and this is what this layout is going to look like in your Elementor page. So now I'm going to add in that same paragraph. So I will grab a text editor. And I'm going to pop it right on top here. And now this is going to be how you can customize and edit your paragraph that you would have been adding using the other editor. And so you wouldn't actually type over here, you would type your text on this left hand side here. And then you can do your traditional bold italic just as you would with your general editor. But the main difference is that you can also change and customize a whole lot more with it. So this one added in an alignment option, you can change your color so that it's more readable against the back. So far that's the same as the Gutenberg. But when you click into this is advanced section, this is where you start getting the added features. So this is where you can start customizing it so that it looks like a little block system. So you can go into this background area and then click on the little brush and change this background so that it looks like a little floating. And this is where you get the layout that I showed on the Alliance section. So if you wanted to feature different categories or feature different areas, you can do it like that. And then you can add a border by rounding off the edges. We'll try about eight. And then you can also go into the motion effects if you had wanted to. And you can make this, you can add some dimension to this so that when people load the page, it'll fade in or fade out. And you can add it so that it will bounce on in there so that you can really draw attention to it. And then you can also go in and add. So if you think that this is too close to the edge here, you can also add padding to it so that it will have a little bit more space on the edge here to be able to block off that little section category. And so this is stuff that you wouldn't have been able to do with the traditional Gutenberg editor. And that's why I added in the Elementor plugin to the Nebraska libraries on the website so that you can do stuff like this. And when you click off of it, you have that little rounded section and your text, you can add in images and do whatever you want with it. Are there any questions about how that kind of like the differences between the two editors and kind of how that works here? I don't see anything pop up yet. If you do have any questions, type into the questions section of your good webinar interface. Do that at any time. If you see something you want to see more about, you're confused about something. Go ahead and ask. And so probably the main thing I get after showing people that this is a thing is that they will tell me, it's great that you know that, but I don't know. There's so many different things you can do to here. I think it's all the different modifications. Yeah. And that's why I put together these page templates. So the page templates kind of have some of the main common features that are available. I actually share them out and make them available via Google Drive just because it accepts the JSON file format, which is the magical little format that makes Elementor happy. And so this is just kind of the best way that I found to share them out. But I will go back into our main page and I'll show you how to use one of these templates. And again, I'm not saving this because no one needs a random block of teal Latin across the Learn WordPress page. I'm going to click back into the main Elementor or the main WordPress site and what I'm going to do is I'm going to reset my whole WordPress thing to what you would see when you initially log into WordPress. So imagine that you've just logged in, you were on your dashboard section and you're starting fresh. You want to add a new page that has the gallery images is one of the biggest questions that I get from libraries is how do I add gallery images for featured items? And so I'm going to go down into pages and add new. And again, it's going to take a second to load. Then the first thing that you want to do is add a title. So I'm going to call it book gallery. If you don't add this title, when you click on the add it with Elementor, it's going to generate a random string that says Elementor and then some random number. And but if you give it a title here, it should grab that title and put it into your page. So I'm going to jump straight into Elementor. And now you see that it grabbed my book gallery title. And again, taking a hot second to load. So now traditionally, when you create a page from scratch, you would add you would click on this plus sign to add new blocks just like you would in the Gutenberg editor. But to use the template, we're going to flip over to this file folder that says add template when you hover over it. And since I actually have these loaded and saved into my page, I can click on my templates. But since you are actually pulling it from an external place, you would go into this import template up arrow. And you would upload the template that I after grabbing it from Google Drive that I saved. But so once it's loaded in, you just grab the one you want, mine is the gallery library to a template will click on insert. And yes, and it just puts it in there. So the top of this does not look spectacular because I added instructions for how to edit and change it. So the top of it looks terrible. It just looks standard. But yeah. So now you're going to see start to see some interesting things. So you're going to probably be wondering, why is this all grayed out? And then why is this not great out? And why is the layout different? I am glad you asked. So this is actually just one single block in Elementor. So when I click on it, these are all the images that have been loaded into the gallery. So you don't have to do anything special. You just pop it in there. And then you can change the width across that this is going. And the reason that this is happening is because I set it so that when you click on an image, you can see it bigger. And so then you can close out of that because that is the other major question that I got is I want to show a gallery, but people want to be able to click it and see it big. And so click on here. So now we have anything that you can or are able to change on this left hand side. And I'll just run through a checklist of the most common things that people change using this template. The first is the columns, which is the number of images that are going across here. If you are using an image that's oriented this way instead of vertically, you would make it two images across so that it appears better on your screen. And the other thing that people change is the way that it appears on different devices. So if you remember, we had one that was kind of regular like this and one that was grayed out. The reason that that is is because when you when you show these image galleries with three images across on a mobile device like this, it doesn't look great. Something you've got to think about is what devices are people going to be looking at this. And so that is why Elementor actually has that option. So you can go into the advanced section, go into the responsive design section, and you can hide different elements and make them make different elements appear based on the screen size. And so the reason that this is grayed out up here is because this is currently hidden on mobile. So the layout option where you have three images going across is hidden so that you won't see it when you're viewing a device that is less than these dimensions wide. And these are just the pixel dimensions of a mobile device. Nice. And so that's pretty much all I did was if you use this template and leave it at the default settings, you should be fine. And when you edit, when you want to change the images that are loaded into these templates, you would just click on it, go into the content section, click into this little gallery, go into this little edit button, and then change the images that are in there. So you would take out the ones that are currently in here just by hitting the little X button on every single one of them. And then you would go into add to gallery and upload new files. So I'll grab the little owl that my niece really likes, and I'll grab some of these. I'll add to gallery and insert gallery. And the only fun fact that you need to know about this template is that you just want to load those same images into both different blocks. So you did it here, do the same thing down here, and that way you have matching images. And then if you remember, I said that if you have an image that's oriented in a different way, you'll probably want to shift it to two images across instead of one. And that this is the reason that we do that is because it's just easier to see. So basically to use that template, all you do is go into log into WordPress, then add a new page, add a title, and then click edit with Elementor, and then click on the file folder icon to import a template. Then click the upward arrow to upload that template and insert the gallery. Click on this block to change the images. Grab the images that you want. Make sure the number of columns are look good to you. And then once you've loaded it into both blocks, the top block is the block that appears on a desktop and a tablet. Repeat the same thing on this bottom block. And save it. And then you can just publish it and it'll go out into the world. And this is the first pumpkin cheesecake I ever made. Oh, nice. It's not, it's maybe not the prettiest thing on the planet, but so good. You know, I do cheesecakes too, and mine crack on the top, and they still taste just as good. I looks are totally irrelevant. Yes. And so I'm not going to save this, but I will show you how I templatified it. So I click on this upward arrow down here, and it just saves template. When you save this template, it'll ask you to add a name. I'm going to call it delete me because that's what I'm going to do. And I'll save it, and it'll add into my list of available templates. And then we'll say that you tried the gallery image, but you want to try something different. So I'm going to close this out here. And I'm going to go back into my main page here. Exit to dashboard. And if at this point you were still a little bit confused about how this works, that's pretty normal. And so I'm going to go back into the WordPress page, and I'm going to run through the process again using a different template. So I'm going to go into, so this is your fresh start in WordPress you logged in, go into pages, and add new. I don't care if you click it up here or click it down here. Do what you feel like. Then we'll add a title, and I'm going to call it homepage. And you'll probably, if you've used WordPress before, you'll probably know that most templates will have a regular page setting, but then they'll have internal theme settings that will let you set your own homepage. But if you use a, if you use this template to create your homepage and set WordPress to display a static page as your homepage, you don't have to mess around with those separate theme settings. You don't have to go somewhere separate to do it. You just edit it using your regular page. So an example of that would be I just added the page, called it homepage. I'll click on edit with Elementor to get into our new plugin settings. Wait a small eternity for it to load. And I guess I'll sip some tea while I'm waiting for that. And then I will do not pass go directly over to the little file folder to add a template. I have already uploaded. If you created a template on the site, it will just load into my templates. Again, you can import it if you're grabbing it from me or from another source. But now I'm going to grab the slideshow homepage. And then I will insert. It's going to ask me if I want to import the document settings, the template and the do. The only reason they ask that is because different themes treat templates different ways. And not all themes react well to the full site editor. So if you are using an older theme that doesn't have responsive layout or an older theme that hasn't updated to the to be compliant with the newest version of WordPress, they sometimes fight with that full site editor or the layout system. And you might get a if you go into your appearance and widget section, and you see a whole bunch of different blocks that either just won't load or appear empty, or just say or say legacy widget. It means that your old theme didn't translate over to the new editor correctly. And that you would need to convert everything over to the new editor by saying by clicking on one of those widget blocks and saying convert to blocks, or just change to a new theme because the old one just done like the new editor. But I digress. So this is kind of an example of one of the most common home page layouts. You would use that slide, like the little sliding image setting. And most people go into something like Canva, make like a little flyer or something like that to feature recent events, and then load it into this slideshow. So we'll click on this and it uses the exact same system that you just saw with the gallery images, you would click on here, go to the edit, and then you can switch out, you can hit the X button and all the images that are in here now, go to add to gallery and pop in your new images. And let's say that we just wanted to add in this one. We'll go to add to gallery and insert gallery. So now our new image shows up on here. My niece really does love that owl. It's an awesome owl, I think. Yes. And then so the other thing is that you can customize the way these arrows appear on here. So if you chose an image color that is just like really weird to appear against this blue color that I chose, you can also go into the style here and change the arrows. So you can shift them so that the arrows are appearing on the outside so that they're easier to see. Or if you really like the arrows on the inside, you can change the color of them to be like a glaring red so that people can definitely see it. And you can, I've made this, I made the arrows the maximum size on here. So I've already slid it up. But if you want a delicate, tiny little arrow, you can do that. I like a big, bold arrow. You wanted to catch people's attention. Yeah. And then the dots down here tell people how many images are available to view in your slideshow. And so you can change this, you can change the color scheme on your dots too and do what you will with them. My default is just on a hair above black. And I just made them as big as you possibly can so people know they're there. And then you can also round, you can also add borders and stuff to your actual images. So if you want like a dark, dark border, you can do that. If you want people to really know about it, you can add it. I usually just leave it regular. And you can also round off your images using that little border image on here. So those are the most common things that people usually change with the slider is the color of the arrows. So people can see it, the color of the dots, and they might just kind of clip off the edges of the images. But for the most part, people usually just kind of leave it as it is. It is nice to know that there are some of those kind of things. I mean, you mentioned Canva as something people use. And it's hard. I know for myself, I'm not a graphic designer. I'm not a website designer. I don't have training in this type of thing. But Canva and the different things you can tweak there and WordPress make it easy to fake it outside. I fake it myself with like figuring out how to make these designs and things. And it's nice to know that there are the little things like that, that you don't really think about just that little curve, that little, you know, around the edges kind of makes it a little, I don't know. Just fancies it up a little bit. So it's nice to know there are those little things you can do. And it's easy for people with zero training to do these things and make your website look like a professional website designer may have done it. Yeah. And then it's super easy to just kind of grab the image that you wanted, download it off of Canva. And I'm just going to grab this first page here, because I don't even remember what the second one is. And then I'll download it, download it. What is the second one? I'll grab that too. Then I'll download the second page, download it, and it'll save. I'll go into my template again, click on my slideshow, tap over to content. I am going to remove a couple of the images. We'll keep my niece's owl, get rid of the turkey, and bye bye frog. Click go to add to gallery. And then I will upload files. Apparently, I have to either delete some files or make some more space, which I will do later. And so apparently, I don't even have that many images in here. Let's delete some. I'm just going to grab this as an example. Insert. It's really not too bad. Once you've popped it in there, it'll just show up as you popped in. And then so the other common thing that people put onto their home pages is the this little card system that's featuring different services or resources that you have available in the library. And this is just a, I made a three column layout. And each different one has a little image box on there that has a pre-formatted image on top. Then you can add a title and a mini description of what the service is about. And then this learn more button is the only thing that you really have to customize separately. Because when I click on this learn more button, it opens up the different settings on the left hand side. You can change the color of the button. You can change what the button says. So if you want it to say, click me, then you can change it there. I usually just call it learn more. And you can change the where it's linking over to. So if you want to link it over to a registration page, a survey or a another web page that gives more information about the service or resource, then you would copy and paste that link over here. So if you want to say, find out more about Canva blah, blah, blah, then you can put this in here. And those are the most common things that people change along with the size of it. So if people really want you to know about it, you can bump up the size and change the color. If you don't like my choice of green, I was having a froggy moment. So I just put it in there. There's a theme. But you can change your color in there. And I mean, a lot of these are relatively self-explanatory too. When you see like color, you know that it changes color. You can change the font color and play around with it. And so once you've customized those to look the way that you want, you can also have in here and start, if you want to use this block, you can. But this is the a similar version of this, but instead of using an image, it uses an icon. So if you wanted to put in like a little computer icon or whatever you want to, you can just click in here. There is an entire icon library so that you can just search for computer. Apparently not. Let's say that you want to use, I'm just going to grab something random here. Here, parenting class. Cool. And then you would put in your mini description. And that's pretty much it. So if you don't want to find your own images, you can just cheat and use that icon library. And if you don't like that shade of blue, if you really think that, I don't know, babies are yellow, then you can do that. And if you don't want to use this block at all, you can get rid of it. So just hover over it and click the X to get rid of it. And then you can also pull in any additional, like if you want to say click on the plus sign and say that we'll go to this text editor block and say, and then you can add in that same exact thing that I did before in the beginning to, you know, I'm going to make the font a normal color. And then you can add in your background color. So people really notice that it's there and change the color to and change padding. And then you can bump this up to the top of the page and get rid of it after your notification is over. And if you really want people to know about it, you can go into this typography section, go into edit, and it'll make the, you can make this size massive and do whatever you need to do with it. And then if you want to templify this yourself, after you've got it looking the way that you want it to, again, you can do the saveless template or save as a draft. And I'm going to, I'm not going to keep this as a traditional template. I'm just going to keep it as it was before. But, and it's 1046. So I'm just going to just give you a quick review of the templates that are available to you if you want to play around with them. The most common one is the gallery library tour that I showed you the first time that has the responsive design option for different mobile settings and desktop, like desktop tablet mobile. You can also delete that second block and make everything, everything visible across the board. If you don't want to mess with responsive design, that is an option. And then you can also play around with this featured event section that I put together in case you want to really highlight some different things that you've got going on. And some, like what they're all about, what people can do at your library, you can do that. And you can also go into, I've also got some digital skill templates. And this is one of the things that I mentioned in the description here is that, and I'm going to make this a little larger so you can actually read the names of this stuff. So if you do want to be able to provide resources for helping patrons buy things, figure out how to buy and sell things online. If you're, they want to use like Etsy or eBay or something like that. There's just, this is just a curated collection of resources that help people do that. And there is a digital skill category page that people can, you can load onto your library website, the categories that are available to people so that library patrons can click on the category they want and then pop over to the right page. All you really have to do with that one is insert the template and then link it over to the right page once you've gotten them added. And you've got resources for parents and technology, you can read through all these later. Basically these templates just made it way easier to add it onto your page. And I'll give you a quick preview of what that would look like on here. I'm not going to go into this one in too much depth, but this is just one that's been getting a lot of use recently. And you might want to see what it looks like. So I'm going to go back and click on my WordPress icon to go back to the starter this whole thing because I don't want this page. Hop in to add a new page, go to jobseeker resources or whatever you want to call it, click edit with Elementor. You can see that it's thinking about it. And I'm just going to click on this file folder. And now this is not a template that I have loaded in already. I'm going to upload it, select the file, grab the jobseeker template, open it. Now I'm going to insert this template. And this is pretty much all those look like. It's a collection of the topic categories. And then when you click it open, it gives the resources on the side. And again, you can change the color if you don't like them, et cetera, et cetera. So I just wanted to gloss over that quickly, just so you know what they look like and that they're available. But I want to touch on how to create your own templates from scratch if you had wanted to. So that is... Do you have a question? You mentioned that this Elementor is a plug-in to WordPress. And I know we provide server space and whatnot for libraries to have websites. Is that something they can do themselves to add this? Are people in our group? Would they need to reach out to you to have this plug-in added to their account, whatever, how it works? So since we run through a multi-site, when I add a plug-in on the network admin side, it becomes available to all libraries that are part of the multi-site. So since I installed it and made it available, it's across the board. It's already there for all of them. Okay. And but if people have their own sites, they would just go and get it themselves if we're not doing it through ours. And Elementor has a free version and a pro version. We use the free version because it does everything we really need it to. But if you do want to do the fancy stuff, you can get the pro version if you want to. And so now I'm going to go in to create a new page and I'll show you how to templatify it from scratch. Cool. If anybody does have any other questions, go ahead and type them in. It is 10.52. So officially we go to 11 o'clock for the show. But what will go as long as it takes for Amanda to show us what she needs to. And if anyone has any questions, but if you do need to leave you only a lot at an hour to watch the show, that's okay. We're recording it. You can always watch the rest of it later if we do go over. And I'm going to call it template test. Just because this is probably not one that I'm going to really do much with. Then I'll go to after I've added the title, we'll go to edit with Elementor. Sipping T is optional. So now instead of going into our file folder, we're going to use this plus sign to add blocks from scratch. Are there any requests for people if you want me to do a template for a home page, a template for an image gallery, a template for what is the pressing template that you need that you've got out there? I don't know. What is everybody looking for? Type in the question something you might be wanting to add to your library's website. And Amanda can demo that. I know libraries are planning for summer reading. I don't know if there would be a particular template that would be related to all the events that happen or the crafts that they do. Yeah. So let's do one for that. So I'll click on this. So you click the plus sign, then you tell it how many columns across you want your layout to have. I'm going to do a double column layout for that one. And then on the left-hand side here, let's grab an image so that we can highlight a crafting service or a crafting program or a crafting event that is going to be coming up. And then I'm going to grab a random picture from my media library and an owl's hood. Let's grab it. So now I'm going to go into this plus sign. So in order to make this menu appear on the left-hand side, you have to click on this plus sign. Otherwise, you won't be able to get it. So I clicked on the plus sign. We'll grab our text editor. And then I'm going to grow into and I'm going to keep this as our dummy text for the description. We'll go into a heading and then we're going to say eight time and then your description. And then you can bold this so that people can really tell that it's there. And now we're going to kind of offset this a little bit. So I'm going to go into this edit section. And then we're going to add, go into the advanced, sorry, that's in style. We're going to the background. Click on this classic. It looks like a little paintbrush. And then we'll click on the color and make this kind of a little grayish so that it kind of offsets and highlights that section. And then we're going to go into our border. Then we'll round out the radius so that it has that kind of like rounded out look. And then I'll click back on it here. And then the next thing I want to do is go into. So sometimes you actually want to feature more text on here than you do image. So when you have a column layout and you hover your mouse right over the center, your cursor will turn into that left, right arrow. And you can actually drag that down. So if you don't want that to be quite so prominent or you want to be able to fit more on the page, that's a good way to do it. And then we'll go back in here. And for whatever reason, the default that they use on here is a really light gray, which I think is actually difficult for some people to read even on a white background. So I usually just change that by default. So I go into style, text color and bump it over to not quite black, but just a hair above it. Something a little more contrasting. Yeah, definitely makes a difference. And then we'll change it over to that padding so that it is a touch more prominent. And that's about it. We'll leave it there. And then you can add in another one. So another two column layout. But this time we'll add the image over here. Just for a little bit of a contrast, we're going to grab Kermit. And then I will offset it a little bit so that it's about the same size. There's a little cheat sheet on here so that it will tell you the percentage that the picture is taking up. So we're at 33.3%. And then you can match it across the board. And then you would add in your text in here. And then you would do that same exact thing with adding in the background color and adding and changing the font color and everything like that. But I'm going to demo some different block types just in case you want to see them. So if you want to feature a video on here, you can also do a similar layout and put a click on the plus sign. And this actually supports Vimeo and YouTube. And apparently Daily Motion never used it, but apparently there you go. So if you click on YouTube, you just copy and paste the link over to the thing you want. And it will automatically populate it in there. You can put a description on here, or you can make the video fill in the whole space if you choose a one column layout instead of a two. And another really common block layout, I will go over to scroll clear down to the image box. So the image box is the option that gave the default setting where you can put a picture on top, then your title, and then your text down below. Some of the most common things that people change with this is they will leave it at full, but go into the style section and change the width so that the picture takes up the whole thing or more of that area. And then you can also round it out, do what you want to. And but the fun part with this one is that with image settings on here, you can actually animate them, which is just kind of fun. You don't have to, but it's just kind of fun. And just keep in mind that too much animation can kind of make people nauseous, but just like a little bit can do the trick. So if you want to feature it, just draw attention to it. The grow, the grow animation is probably one of the most common ones could actually make it so. And so there's just a whole bunch of different options on here. The way that I did the image box layout for the homepage is that I chose this column section, and I just did three image boxes all the way across. And then I changed the width so that the image goes 100% in each different content area. And then I changed the background color of it, the background color of the actual section. And that was pretty much it. I think I also rounded out the images. But I mean, once you start playing around with the different blocks that are available, you can do a lot with it. Yeah, we do have a question. So I want to see something demonstrated. I want to know, see how to create a template with a sidebar on the left or the right, whichever sidebar is static to the template. And the rest of the page is what will change. So like something that always sits there. Yeah, on one side or the other. So the best way to do that is I'm actually going to close these out because that's something that would actually have to be done from the beginning. So I'm going to click on this plus sign. And then so they've also actually made got pre made sidebar templates. So you can click on this one, assuming that you want your sidebar on the right hand side. And Elementor has made two different options for this. You can click on the plus sign, go into your block setting. And you can scroll down to I'm just going to start. Oh, here it is. Sidebar. Choose sidebar. Right. I don't actually think that I populated anything into the right sidebar settings for this website. But if I had it with this block and Elementor actually pulls all of your settings from your sidebar set from your appearance and widget section. So if you create different different types of widgets in that section, Elementor will automatically populate the entire thing in here for you. So that's one way that you can do custom sidebar sidebars using the same kind of format that you did before just in a different way. But if you don't want to use the sidebar option, I'm going to delete this. You can click on here, hit the plus sign so that you want an image that's going to be a clickable Facebook button on the top. Come on. I'm probably not going to actually physically load a lot of these images just because it's taken a while. Yeah. But say that you wanted a, I know that I have the image loaded in here. Well, here, let's say that you want to load it, link it over to Pinterest. And then you don't want it to be quite that big. So you're going to bump it down a little bit. And then you want to add a new block. So all you do is click into this little block setting. And then you'll say, say that you want to feature a video in your sidebar. I don't know what you actually want to put in your sidebar, whatever you want. But you just drag it over into that section. You'll know that it's placed in the right spot because this little blue rectangle will appear indicating placement. You'll let her rip. And then you'll click on here and add in whatever video you want. And you can also add in a list of upcoming events because Elementor will also pull in widget sections. So where are my events? Let's type it, sign, find it. Event, you can pop that in here. I don't actually have any events that are pre-populated into the project blog, but if I did, they'd show up there. And that's just basically a list of what you've got coming up. And then if you want your main content section, you can also add in. And if you do want this to be multiple columns, you can add more columns to this section. So you can add an intersection and add more columns. And let's say that you wanted this to be image. And sorry. I wouldn't do a gallery in a space that's small. Let's say your library has a SoundCloud account. You can embed a media player in here that's linked over. There's a default SoundCloud integration. So if you do have anything loaded on there, you can just automatically pop it in just from the link. And then you can also add in more. And I'm going to add in this little plus sign here because it just makes it easier to access the blocks. We'll click in the plus and say that you want a registration button that's going over to upcoming event. And then you are going to add in the plus sign. And you want a heading that says a paragraph underneath it. I'm just going to leave it at that just as a description. And then your register button down below. And we're going to make this large. And depending on how you want this to show up, you can also change this so that the background is a different color. And you can change. I don't want to do that. We're going to make it that gray just because it's somewhat readable. I want a series of sections to have the same background. So I'm actually going to copy this hex code that's telling me what color this is. And then I'm going to go back into my style. Add my padding. I have about 10. Go in here. This little next section. Go into the advanced. Go to background. And then I'm going to change the color. And I'll paste in that gray color. I want this to appear so that it's all one block. So I'm going to go into this advanced. And I'm going to chain. I'm going to unlock the margin. So I click the unlink on here. And then I'm going to do a negative margin. So that it looks like it's all one section. Then I'll do a padding up 10 so that it aligns with the little section of top above it. And now I want the same thing to happen with the with the register button. So I'll change the background color to that gray. And now I'm going to change the margin so that it looks like it's going to the same thing. I forgot to unlink it. That's why I was applying to everything. Now dump this up here. So now it looks like it's all the same thing. Add more padding so that it's not just all up in there. And so that's how you can simulate the effect of. So these are three separate blocks, but on your page it's going to look like one sneaky. Yeah. And if you want the rounded edges on this style format, you would click on the header. That's like the header block that's across the top. And then you'll go into border. And then you can unlink these radius. Then you'll go to the top radius and go to that eight. And then the top right goes to eight. We're not going to touch the bottom because that would look weird. And then we'll go to this bottom registration button. Go to the border. Then I'm going to unlink it. Go to the bottom. Go to eight. And eight. So now it simulates the look of that rounded edge. If I had kept the border radius linked so that the edges would kind of apply to around the whole thing, you would have a little weird looking rounded white space in the middle here. But you don't want that. So I just unlinked it and did the top two corners of the top block and the bottom two corners of the bottom block. It might take a little bit of fiddling around with that to get it to look the way that you want. But hello. Now you know what's a thing. That you can do that. Yeah, awesome. Great. And I'm sure there's a mess of other stuff that I could show, but... Yeah. There's obviously lots of features, lots of customization that libraries can do, that people can do to their web pages, which is... Yeah. And of course, I would also do the same background thing to this little block here. So this would have the same background. And then I would add a margin across the bottom so that it splits off from this little section here. And that's how you can simulate that same sort of design that you would, that you saw on Alliance's website. If you just add the background around the edges and change the margin so that these are more spaced out, it'll look exactly the same. So I see this can do, you can do a lot of experimenting with this and play around with it and adjust things. And you can always, this thing too, you can always publish a page, put it out there just to see what it looks like. But if you don't like it, you change it and don't make it an official part of your site yet. And you know, you maybe have like a test page or something that you play around on that's not yeah, officially part. And it's like, yes. And you can just save this as a draft. And then that way you can... And then you can view the draft page looking. Yeah, I've done that before you see what it looks like before you actually officially publish. Yeah. And then you can view it in, if you click on this little responsive mode button, you can see what this would look like on a mobile platform and tablet and all that. So you can see how, yep. Awesome. And I'll pretty much leave it at that, but if there are any questions, you know where I am, it's on the page here. Yeah. Yes, it's about, it's 1115. So if anybody does have any last minute desperate questions, you want to ask them in to get them in. But as she says, you know where to find her. And as we said, she is, you know, in charge of the Nebraska libraries and the web project that we have providing websites for libraries. But she will also help you with your websites too if you're not part of that group, just if you have, you know, need advice and if you have your own that you're running, that's perfectly fine too. But if you do want to become part of the group, reach out to her as well, or if you want to need a website for your library, just see if anybody types anything. I can't see what you're typing unless until you hit enter. So and if I don't, I'm going to wait just another second here and see if anything comes in. Oh, we're getting awesome. Thank yous. Very useful. All right. So definitely check out Elementor, get the plug in and see what you can do to personalize and make your website look like nobody else's. All right, I'm going to pull presenter control back to my screen and then doesn't look anybody has any questions or anything else that they want Amanda to show right now. That's fine. Just making sure. Okay, cool. All right. So thank you Amanda so much for sharing this with us. As I said, you know, lots of changes happened to WordPress and Elementor will definitely help you figure out and deal with all of that. I'm definitely going to be working, you know, experimenting with it for some of the pages that I may run here, some of the sites I have. So thank you, Amanda, for being here with us. Thank you everybody for attending today. Amanda will be back with us at the end of March, March 30th is the next pretty sweet tech. We'll see what her topic will be for that. Not sure if we've got thoughts on that yet. I'm still waiting on a date back from Brian. That's right. We do have someone we're working with so it might be that. Okay. So keep your eyes open on our website and we'll see what she comes up with. So that will wrap it up for today's show. It has been recorded as I said. These are all of our upcoming shows but right underneath here's a link to our archives. Today's show will be on the top of the page with a link to the recording and a link to Amanda's slides. Her Google slides there. So Amanda, send me your link when you get a chance. So you will have all those resources. You can see this is our full archives here. You can search our show, our full archives if you want to, or just most recent 12 months if you want something just current. That is because this is our full show and I'm not going to go all the way down because we are in our just check. These are all of our recordings going back to the beginning of Encompass Live. The show premiered in January 2009. So we are actually in our 13th year of Encompass Live. Oh my gosh. And everything is here. So just do pay attention. If you do look at some, you do a search in here or go away back, just pay attention to the original broadcast date of anything that's on here. Some of the information will stand the test of time but some things will become old, outdated, links may be broken, services may have changed drastically since the original broadcast date. But everything has a date so you can always make sure you are, you know when it was originally done. Oh, and I'll click on that. There we go. The link for the slides that will be included when I get the recording up. We do have a, you can see I've got a link here, a Facebook page for Encompass Live. If you like to use Facebook, give us a like over there where you put reminders because you're invited to log in to today's show, information about our presenters, when recordings are available of previous shows. So you can take a look at that. We also post onto Twitter and Instagram and I'm not sure where else. I'll use the Encompass Live hashtag. So if you like to just follow, you can use other things, keep an eye on that. I'll hope you join us for next week's show, which I just added while we were speaking. So if you looked at this schedule like before this morning, you wouldn't have seen it. I just got this confirmed. Next week's show is what changes to public service loan forgiveness mean to you. This is the big topic. It's in the news. Everyone's trying to deal with it, public service loans supposed to be forgiven. There was a lot of difficulty getting approved, but major changes have been made to the program. And I see everywhere on Facebook and Twitter and online, lots of librarians posting and other people too in public service that they finally are getting these kinds of loans approved and forgiven. Matt Amary from Kenton Public Library in Massachusetts runs a support group on Facebook for people involved in this. And he's going to be on the show next week to tell us how you can possibly apply and get this kind of forgiveness for your public service loans. You may have taken it out for going to library school. So definitely sign up for that show or any of our other future ones. I got all the March dates here. I'm working on some more April dates, so keep an eye on our schedule. Also, I just want to remind everyone that coming up in two days this Friday is big talk from small libraries. This is our annual online conference where all of our presenters are from libraries with a population they serve or an FTE of 10,000 or less. So if you are a small library or interested in what smaller libraries are doing, this is the conference for you. The schedule is on the website, so you can see what sessions we'll be hosting, information about the speakers, and registration is open until the day before. You can sign up and get notified when the registration link. Even if you don't get registered, the day of we will post the login information here so that anyone can come in on the fly if you need to. So definitely please do sign up and join us on Friday. Big talk is always the last Friday in February. We have presentations from universities, high school here, our first one of the day, and public libraries. So all types of libraries can find something on Big Talk for them. So please register for that in any of our upcoming Encompass Live shows. So thank you, everybody. Thank you, Amanda. See you in a month. And hopefully we'll see everybody else at a future Encompass Live. Bye-bye.