 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. We do record the show every week as we are doing today and I'll show at the end of today's show where you can access our archives and how you can search through all of them. 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 the topics we have on the show. For those of you not in Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. In other states, it may be just called the whatever state library or just called the Commission here. So we provide services to all types of libraries in the states, training, consulting, grants, education, everything. So you will find things on our show that are for public libraries, academics, K-12s, corrections, museums, archives, on and on and on. Really the only criteria is that it's something that libraries are doing or something that libraries could be doing, I think library related. We do training sessions, demos of services and products, book review sessions. We bring in guest speakers from outside the Nebraska Library Commission, outside the state, all across the country and even outside the country to just talk about what the cool things they're doing in their libraries. We also have Nebraska Library Commission staff that do things specific for us. Before we get into the show, I just want to quickly pop over to our library commission homepage. It's our main page here. And I want to, I'm doing this every week to remind you, buddy, we are still in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and actually the last thing I saw on the news, things are getting worse. Again, cases are increasing across the country. So here's library commission in Nebraska. We do have some resources here for our libraries. These are, you know, a link here, a blog post here that is posted and pinned to the top for our webpage. It's always there for you at the top above everything else. We have a list that we're attempting to maintain of our Nebraska libraries, who's open, who's closed, who's making special accommodations, like why find the parking lot curbside pickup, who has now reclosed. Many libraries across the country have how it opened up and now had to reclose due to outbreaks coming again. So I just want to show you, we have that. And this is our link with resources we have where you can let us know what you're doing in your library. We have some maps here for Nebraska. Then we have the subpage of some good resources that you can use. Some of these things can you can use with your patrons. What can I do about homeschooling, financial help, unemployment, et cetera. And then the second link here is specifically for library resources. Now, if you're not in Nebraska library, all of this stuff in here is free and open. It's just all stuff on our website you can go there and use it if you want to. Just be aware of the things that are Nebraska specific. So we have information here about closings, about information and updates and resources about reopening your library and what you can do to make things safe for you and your staff and your patrons. Specific information for school libraries, hosting meetings, board meetings. This is specific to Nebraska. Be aware of that. If you're not in Nebraska library, check out your own states, rules and regulations about that. Examples of policies and how other libraries have done it. We're always adding to this page too. So keep an eye on here. Well, if there's new research done or webinars being announced or things you can look into to find out more about how to handle things during the pandemic. As I said, this is our page for Nebraska. Some things are just general information that anybody can use. Some are specific to Nebraska. But check your local state library or your state library association. They may be saying the same kind of information with more local things for you as well, Nebraska. So let's get into today's show then. I'm going to hand over control to you, Amanda, to get your screens up. I see you're connected to go to webinar screen. Let's see if I can move this over. There it is. Yep. Is that your first slide or is there one? Oh, there it is. Yeah, awesome. All right. So it is the last Wednesday of the month, which an encompass live means it is pretty sweet tech day. The last Wednesday of the month, Amanda Sweet, she is our technology innovation librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And we've got her schedule to come on once a month to talk about something techie related. Sometimes during other times during the month, there'll be things that are tech type. But you can always guarantee that on her pretty sweet tech show, there'll be something that would be for all you tech types out there. And today, she's going to talk about WordPress, which I use, we use it here at the commission. I used it for personal things that I used to do. I'm kind of slacking on that. But lots of changes in things coming in WordPress as usual. So I'm just going to hand over to you, Amanda, to tell us all about what's going on with WordPress and how we can use it really effectively. All right. So I've gotten a ton of questions about revamping your WordPress website, because people want to add more digital skills stuff. They want to add more online resources, do virtual story time and all that fun stuff. So in this one, I'm going to touch on briefly what WordPress is. You probably already have a pretty good guess. And we're going to go over kind of the basics of what most libraries put on their website to help you get started brainstorming about what you can do for the first time or what you can do differently. And then I'll give some tips for how to get people together in library staff to start that brainstorming process and make sure you don't miss anything. And then we'll go over some resources and a quick demo of how to do the basic WordPress skills. It's not too bad. You'll get the hang of it pretty quickly. WordPress is, I really, I don't know if I'd say enjoy using it, but it's not too difficult. Yeah. There's a lot in there, but if you just know the places to go, it just works. I guess maybe that's what I'm going to say. Yeah. It's like it takes some practice time, but it gets there. And then finally we'll go over once you have everything set up, what can you do to make sure that you and your staff stay on updating the website? Because that's one of the biggest things that people run into is we just spent all this time getting this stuff together. And then we never touched it again. So this will go over how to set yourself a schedule and stay on track with adding posts, adding updates and all that stuff. All right. So WordPress is basically a way to build a website. Originally it was designed mostly for blogs. So blogs are when you can go onto a website and then you can add like a little blurb or a little image or do some marketing or something for your library. And it keeps an RSS feed. And that RSS feed will let people sign up so that they can follow your blog. And a lot of you probably already follow blogs already, but WordPress will let you do that for your library. And there's an alternative option that WordPress started adding which is you can turn instead of making your main page a blog, you can make it a featured page so it looks more like a standard website. So instead of having like individual blog postings defaulted on your home page, you can make just a large full cover image or you can do like that sliding presentation bar that will let you feature different things on your website. So WordPress has added a lot more flexibility and it uses pre-made themes so you don't have to worry too much about designing the look of your website from scratch. You'll just be able to sift through what a whole bunch of developers have already put a ton of work into. And since they did all the work, it's easier for you to just choose the look that you want to customize it and you're good to go. That's awesome for those of us like me who are not a graphic designer in any way shape or form. Right, yeah. And even like even those who are good at graphic design, when you have to do the content and do all the planning and then do the graphic design and then do all the things, it is hard to be like the one person crew for your entire website design, develop and everything. But yeah. And WordPress has a ton of pre-made resources both from WordPress itself and from WordPress enthusiasts so you have plenty of help there. So one thing that if you are not a Nebraska library, you might run into the whole WordPress.com versus WordPress.org thing. And so WordPress.com was somewhat of the original and it is mostly all blog based and it's more of the free option. So if you go into WordPress's website and some of you may have actually helped patrons set this up so that they can play around with blogs and play around with web design. But this WordPress.com tends to have less flexibility and less customization and it's not self-hosted. WordPress.com hosts it through WordPress options. But WordPress.org is what the library commission uses for Nebraska libraries on the web and that is self-hosted on library commission servers. So for the ORG option you need to know a little bit more about doing your own servers and running site maintenance and stuff like that. But .com will do it for you. So it's sort of .com has more has less customization but it's easier to run if you're a small business small library and don't have the server knowledge. But WordPress.org has a lot more customization but you just have to do a little more work to maintain it. And I'll link over to the this slide so that you have access to this comparison chart from WPBGinner and the comparison guide from WordPress itself so you can dig deeper into that to find out which one is best for you. Okay so now let's get into kind of the details of you've decided that you want to probably go with WordPress. But now how do you go about it? So the next little section of this presentation is going to be just digging deeper into who's actually looking at your website because if you don't know who's looking at it you don't know what to put on it and why they're going to be accessing the information. And then once you know who's looking at it you'll start brainstorming what should go on there. I'll give you some tips of what other libraries have done some common things that are just generally on every website. And then once you know what's going to go on the website you can choose a layout and a theme that will work best for you. And I'll actually hop into WordPress and show you what that would look like in there. And I'll also show you the like a basic little pack of skills that you would need just to get started. There's a ton you can learn with WordPress but you don't need to know all the things just to get started. And then you'll go into just kind of the when is going to be your maintenance mode and your planning to set accountability and make sure that you actually prioritize doing it. And then who's doing it is it's mostly up to you. It's either you're going to be doing yourself you might have an intern that comes in or you might have a set of library staff that might be working on it. All right so in terms of who's looking at the website the top three are the usual demographics that people go to right away like kids adults parents they go through how the library is separated out into sections young adult kids adults the visual the bottom part of it is more of what you want to start thinking about is are are the people going on this website just bored are they lonely do they want to make connections are they curious about different things are they familiar with technology already are they going to be anxious about using the computer in the first place do they need help with that what is it that people need to find to find on your site first to meet the need of what they're going on there for if you know that your community has been hit really hard by covid and you have a lot of people looking for a job and wanting to upskill put that up front and send here on your website feature it with a bright splashy image and make sure it's easy to get to the links so that people don't click away from your website so now what do you actually need to put on your website so on the list here i put some of the common things that pretty much every library it's not you don't need to have every single one of these but these are the common things that i've seen the most often over the past few years so the events calendar is usually up front and center and then listing out all the different available services both in person and digital and if your library has closed due to covid or has limited hours make sure that you switch over to feature the digital services before in person and you can kind of change the way that your site is organized so that you start to bury those in person features more and raise up the digital service offerings like virtual story time or um like Khan Academy or different online sessions that you might be doing then every library tends to have the hours and location and contact information on the right hand side of the website that just kind of the most it's where people are used to looking for it so it became kind of like a web design standard so it just helps to have it on there and then some people like to have a visual of what your library is going to look like they want to know that they're going in the right place so having an image of your library on your hours and contact information page so people can mentally match up and say yep that's a building I'm looking for and staff bios and kind of community history are just kind of fun to have and they help people it helps personalize the library and helps to make that human connection that says yep this is a place I need to go and then the last thing that you want to do is start deciding whether you want to have a blog or a features page on your front web on your front web page this doesn't have to be a hard and fast decision just because this brainstorming step is mostly just you listing out on a sheet of paper you can either type it out in microsoft word or if your hand if you're a handwritten person whatever you prefer just start brainstorming and writing more than what you're probably actually going to put on your website because you can eliminate and reorganize as you go along and some people like to put this on a posted note board just to reorganize visually it's actually how I do it so now when you have that master listing then you can start grouping things and I mean I'm sure everyone has been on the website by now so if you imagine your top menu screen you know that most menus they can either click directly on your link and it'll send you right over to your web page or that top menu you'll be able to click a drop-down menu and it'll give you more options so what you're organizing here is a listing that says this services is going to be that top menu that people will see on the screen then they'll be a little downward arrow that you can click open and you'll see this menu here so you don't want to have a menu that has one separate link for every single different option on here because you would have like a three-row menu instead you want to start grouping things and saying okay these are all the services when someone goes on to a website they know what services are they'll be able to click this open and find out do I need services for kids services for teens or services for adults then they click this page and then they would get all the different offerings and resources available for kids teens or adults and some libraries they just have one page for all services for everyone and they'll be able to click on this services page and then you would open up to a separate page listing and then you would click category inside that page so this is where you want to start saying okay I want to show people that I have services for kids teens and adults I wrote out all of my notes of what we have available if you don't have a ton available for each different section put it all on one page if you do have a ton available for each different section put it on separate pages because the longer people have to scroll on a website the less likely they are to read it and they've actually done a ton of studies about this so that's why you start seeing more web designs being reformatted so that it's in smaller chunks or it's in like a refreshable layout so that you can I'll give you a demonstration of this one so we get over into the WordPress side of this as to what this actually looks like but right now this is just the planning phase of it you're not thinking about don't get too deep into the weeds otherwise you'll get like analysis paralysis which I've seen so many times but so now you're just you brainstormed you have a generic listing of what you want now you're grouping stuff to get the idea of what you want it to look like on your website itself and so as you're going through this process keep asking yourself the same question over and over and over again what do people want to accomplish on my website and as you start adding different images and different content does this content actually meet a need and how are people going to be able to find it because of people can't if people are saying okay I want to learn new job skills I heard that the library was the place to go do it they go to your website and where did they go is there something on your menu that says job skills is there a big giant featured sliding image that said that has someone who looks like they're in like a business suit and that says learn job skills using digital resources you know in your mind as the librarian that you have this information on your website the user has no idea that you have this what they don't know what you named it they don't know where you put it and they will not call you directly to find out and it's because the more work that a person has to do to find information on your website the less likely they are to use it because the average site engagement on a website is eight seconds the average time it takes for people to to click on an initial menu item on a website is four point seven seconds and people are used to just going and grabbing what they need right away but so if you start brainstorming this and then saying what do people want to accomplish and then put stuff up front and center on there so now before you even start thinking about the layout and thinking about what your website is going to look like start gathering the actual images and content because you won't be able to choose the right thing unless you already know what's going to be on it so at this stage start asking around for people who have images of your community images of library and start opening up just a word document and start writing out what is actually going to go on these pages when you know what's going to go on the pages when you actually put it into word press it's a whole lot easier and it's mostly because there's a there's a dual learning curve going on here so one learning curve is you're trying to figure out what's even on the website and then the other learning curve is you're trying to figure out how to design the website and how to use the word press as a tool itself in a larger website team this is two separate people but a lot of libraries this is a one person team so it depends on how your library is structured because the traditional website team you have one person who lays out the website needs and then one part and then that one person is doing user studies and they're asking around for what is actually needed they do user research and then there's another person that will do the actual layout and then there will be another person that writes the content and gathers the images and then there will be a website developer that would put all this together so if you have that great you probably don't need me but if you don't have that then you're trying to do this all on your own and that's where I come in handy so that's what I that's who I'm gearing this process toward is the people who are struggling through and trying to do this on their own because we're all strapped for time and resources okay so with that side note once you have all of your images and content together you've gotten help from whoever is able to pitch in and you know exactly what you want to say on each different page you know the phrasing that you want you've gone through and you've prioritized what you really need on the site and you know sort of what you want to put on the home page you know what people are going to be looking for first on the website and you know what to put up front and center and if you don't already have pictures of a community I linked over to pixabay and upsplash that you can grab the free images on there and you have eliminated all library jargon because when people see just the word databases or just Nebraska access they don't always know what that means and if they don't know what it means they won't click on it so it helps to say Nebraska access and then a little description or a little visual image of what that actually is so people know what they're getting into and they have incentive to click on it then once you once you get an idea of what is going on your website this is when you want to explore what your website is going to look like so a few things to keep in mind there's a ton of themes out there and a theme is just the overall look of your website it's going to lay out what the menu is going to look like it'll have general color scheme it'll lay out what the actual pages that you click on are going to look like and then you want to make sure that it is a responsive layout and responsive means that it works on a desktop it works on a tablet and it works on a smartphone because the majority of people now are accessing websites on the go on their smartphone and if they have to keep zooming in and zooming out on your website they probably won't stay on it for very long I know I don't and that's when people just stop trying so most websites most layouts now are responsive but you still want to test it on different size screens and then you want to make sure that there are customizable settings so that if you don't like the original color you're able to change it say if your library has specific color guidelines or logo guidelines or if your community has like specific colors like Nebraska's all about red you want to make sure that you have those options available when you're first choosing this theme option and what your website is going to look like branding and having things you recognizable is so important yeah especially like you're saying when you're on a device it's small you can just as a quicky glance you see oh that's the logo for the library I know that exactly and so then the I put in some major examples Nirvana is the theme that I use most frequently followed by Divi Astra Ocean WP has been hit or miss now and Hescha is another one that a lot of libraries have used but Nirvana is probably one of the most common it's my default theme okay so now I believe is a good time to just hop in here and do you see the WordPress page on here yes digital tools it says in the center yeah and I'm just going to go into my main dashboard here so when you set up a WordPress website this is what it's going to look like so once you have your whole website planned out and I recommend not even touching this until you have the the basic idea of what's going to be on your website and what you know is going to be on here and this is why it's because when people first look at this for the first time it can be a little overwhelming because you need to start looking at what these different terms mean in terms of an actual website so posts and I'm going to go over this is a new website that I'm just setting up right now I got an email this morning that they got the all clear to set up nice so this is not a fully set up website this is actually what it looks like when you first get a default theme using Nebraska libraries on the web so it'll just have your library name and then we'll go in and change this to customize it to the actual library and then there is a slider menu that you'll be able to put in customized images and then this is where you would put in your features so if you have learn job skills online and then like a little mini description then you would click the read more button to access the actual resources or get like a schedule of online learning sessions or different things like that and then this is where you can have additional features so you'd be able to load in different images and this is why you want it to be really eye catching and you want the image to match what it's actually going to be and you can also disable these different kinds of columns so that these don't appear and instead you can just have a little main information page so if you have a COVID notice that you would want it to put up here that says we had just unfortunately had to close again and we're going we anticipate being able to open an earliest notice you'd be able to put that here and this is what your blogs would look like so this is a blog and it'll tell you who wrote the blog when it was written a general blog category so that people can kind of find out they can run through your archive your blog archives and find out what's popular like if you have a lot of blog postings about events or about kids events or different things like that the user won't see this edit button that's only for you as the administrator when you're logged in and then there would be a little snippet of information or an image and some people just some people actually go through and save the pdf that has all the information right there and just pop the pdf in there so that you can use it in your website and you can use it in as a flyer or something like that you just want to make sure that the text on there is large enough to read in both formats and but this is really it's really customizable as to what you actually want to put on there if you don't want to maintain a blog you can disable these blogs on here but if you disable these blogs to keep your website fresh I would recommend continually updating this rotating banner menu this slideshow menu so that people know what's going on when they first click on to your website and this is that menu that I was talking about so that when it has that little downward arrow you know that you can hover over this and you'll be able to access more stuff and the fun thing is that if you have a lot of people in your community that need to build up their digital skills they may not know what that downward era means and they may not know how to navigate a traditional website and if they don't know how to navigate a traditional website they wouldn't be able to navigate your website so if you put in digital skills inside of a drop-down menu it's occasionally confusing for people who have never seen it before so that's why you have digital skills digital tools or digital skills just as a clickable link on here so let's go back into our dashboard here and we'll go into this post section this post section is how you would update your regular blog posting and so we go to posts all posts this will bring up a table of all the different posts that are already on your website and these were the ones that I just put into the default just as a it's a training tool just because you can go in here and change what this post look like so every time WordPress opens up a little table like this there will be another mini menu that shows up when you hover over a post title you go to edit and it's going to take a second to load I'll close this preview tab that should speed it up a little so this is our classic editor on here so this is what WordPress used to look like but they WordPress recently changed their editor and then they changed their editor again so it's now the Gutenberg editor and it uses it's okay right it's okay and the fun thing is that I actually like this editor more and it's because of this edit with Elementor edit with Elementor is a plugin that I added to the Nebraska Library Commissions on the website and it provides more layout flexibility so if the theme that you chose doesn't have the look that you are looking for you can use edit with Elementor and I'll just click on it here it takes a second to load so this will give you a whole ton more flexibility in building your layout so you have your original post we're going to get rid of this because no one wants to read a post that just says this is a post so let's revamp this a little bit and we'll go to this intersection over here and this is our drag and drop software so now this intersection has broken out our column into two different sides and there's a little plus sign here and a little plus sign there and when you click into this plus sign you're able to add in more different features so the most common layout is to add an image and then some text so this is how you can break out your layout differently and adds more flexibility this is something that could also because I know there's different templates that have multiple columns two three whatever you know like you've got this center blog post thing and then the hours and stuff down the side is that customizable as well because I have some people want to move things I want this in the left or this in the right or I only want three I want two columns not three yeah so this one you can go in here and I'm going to go back into so you can click on the plus to add in a new block when you click on the block it'll ask how you want to select your structure so the traditional structure is a one wide block but if you want the three you can click on that and it'll automatically do it for you and then there's lots of templates out there that people create with different designs and people might like oh I like the picture or the colors of this one or something but this part the one two three however isn't what I like what the original designer made can I somehow make it my way using their graphics so to speak and like you can even clear cut the side bar widget and you can just start going rogue and make your own be brave go rogue so that's why I like like that's why I like WordPress is because it has that flexibility and Elementor for me was a game changer and Elementor was an add-on plugin that is not automatically included in the WordPress package it had to be downloaded but there is all this is a free version I was gonna say is it just a cost anything that would be a question from some people yeah so this is the free version there's also a pro version and if you really like specialized image galleries and you like to have heavily customized websites then the pro version might be right for you but everything that I needed I could do with the free version and if it was paid I just didn't do it all right so now I'm going to every time you hover over a top the top of this block that you just added there'll be a little delete section sign the X so it's really easy that if you are just playing around with it that you're able to get rid of it so this and I want to be clear about this this is the Elementor plugin option that I did just for demonstration you don't need to use Elementor it's not necessary you can use the regular Gutenberg editor and it will do what you need it to do so I'm going to go up into this left hand corner and I'll go exit to dashboard and the dashboard is what you need to go to navigate to pretty much everything you need to edit or customize on your website and so now we're back in our main page so you can go back and forth between editors and say I'm going to click on back to WordPress editor and I'm going to continue because I don't want to save any of the changes and I'm going to so I never hit update so you know that in Elementor I got rid of this but it's still here and it's because no changes will take effect unless you hit update or publish on here so that's why this still exists so now I'm going to click on this little more options menu I'm going to remove this block and now this is what your traditional editor is going to look like this is the Gutenberg editor that you're going to get right out of the box if you start using WordPress and it will always have this little plus sign on here that says add block this plus sign will be here and in the upper left hand corner these will both do the exact same thing this plus sign is easier to find a lot of the times so just click on this and now it'll give you the different options that are available to choose from so if you wanted to add in a little paragraph in here then you can just type in paragraph and you can start texting in and now let's say that you want to add an image so now we use this one or you use this one to add in an image and so I'm going to let's see what's in my media library so the media library is everything is all the images that you have already loaded into WordPress to be able to use on your existing site so overdrive was a really popular one so this is my default image that I put onto every site so we select it and now you can resize it and you can also change the alignment on it so that it will go left center it or you can go right and you can also use these little arrows up here to change the order of your blocks so if you just added a paragraph maybe you didn't want that paragraph right there you wanted to put overdrive image on top so you can easily navigate through and change the order of that and then there's also a handy crop option which honestly I wouldn't use for this because then you wouldn't necessarily see all the different options on here but and so I'm not going to apply any changes I'm just going to cancel it and so then you can hit this plus sign up here to add more blocks and so I've also added a PDF embedder so not all of the blocks that you'll see on my screen are immediately available on your default WordPress when you first install it so this PDF embedder is a separate plugin that I added into WordPress so that it will automatically format the PDF on your website so that it's not overly large and it's not super tiny so that you're able to display the PDF in your page without doing any extra steps on your own so I clicked on that PDF then you go to click here to open media library and I have the this digital skills PDF that I used just as a tutorial example so now in your admin side all you'll see when you add that PDF is this link but when we hit update update will just save the changes that I put in here and now I'm going to hover over this library name we'll go to visit site I'm going to right click open a new tab so that our dashboard is still open then this is going to take a second to load we'll scroll down here and this is what we just edited and this is the PDF that was automatically embedded by the PDF embedder to fit into the width of the post content and this is why if you remember earlier in the session here I mentioned that if you have a PDF that you want to use both as a flyer that you can print out and something that you want to put on the web you want to make sure that the text on here is large enough for people to read in both formats so since this is coordinated off to this one little mini section the text was shrunk down to half of what it usually is but if you have an embedder that goes into the full width of the page like on an actual page it'll be a lot bigger so I'll show you what that looks like here so this was the posts now we're going to go into pages and all pages and so now this is this is a really similar looking table to what we just saw for the posts so we're not going to spend a ton of time here since the mechanics are all the same but in this case last time we went to an existing page and hit edit this time we're going to add a new page so both blogs and pages you can click add new to get something new on there now it'll ask you to add in a different title so now we're going to add in that PDF embedder we're going to put that same PDF into a page so I clicked on media library my PDF is already loaded in here I clicked it we'll select it you just have that PDF and the link this link is actually heading over to the internal stored system that is in WordPress now we're going to hit publish and publish is going to make sure that this is visible to the public and it's going to do it ASAP you can also schedule posts and scheduled pages to appear at certain times in the future I use that a lot I don't know what I don't know if I want something to post or just because I'm thinking about it now and I don't know if I'll be thinking about it tomorrow when I want this to happen yeah so when life happens schedule so now we're going to this was what we added before but now this is what just was just added so I made the defaults and all these websites that whenever you add a new page it's going to manually be added into your menu so now if you remember I said that if you have too many separate tabs on here then it starts to add a new row to your menu and it just it looks a little messy to have an entire row up here and then just one little floater so but we click on the digital skills test and here's our PDF and you can see that it looks a lot different so now we're going to go over into and I'll actually open this one more time so now one other thing that you'll need to know pretty much right away is when you click open one of these pages you have a sidebar on the right hand side here where it says hours and contact information events and you can add in any clickable images and links so this links is actually in another menu and this events is tied into a separate plugin so you are going to get different options for this right side menu based on the different plugins that you've put into your site so let's go over here so the plugins that we have available installed plugins and one thing that you want to look at for any plugins or any new thing that you add to your site is do a privacy like a security check to make sure that there are no known vulnerabilities inside your plugin before you add it and WordPress has a great resource and I'll link over to one other resource that I use a lot to check that and just checking over the reviews if it helps a lot so a lot of these are for blocking spam some of them we also have a few different calendar options just because people have different needs for different things so the calendar is just your standard it shows up as a regular calendar but the events manager is the one that I really like it supports recurring events you can do a listing it has a sidebar like a widget feature embedded in there so that you can put the calendar on the right hand side you can put it into a main page and the free part helps a lot I like free and yeah there's also a booking option on here so that if you have something that if you have an event that requires registrations you can do that through your website if you have wanted to but so that is the plugins that are available now if we want to be able to customize that sidebar on here we go into appearance and widgets and this is going to take another second to load here so this is yet another plugin that I put in here so usually this custom sidebars will not appear so normally you would just have this little right hand menu and it would usually say right sidebar first footer second footer and there would usually not be anything else on here but I added in a custom theme sidebar so that you have greater customization over your website so the right sidebar is what actually has stuff in it so this is another drag and drop option the two most common things you'll probably use are image and text so I'm going to scroll down to text here and we're just going to drag and drop the text option in here and we're just going to type in a title that says this is a test and delete when done then we're going to save it we'll go back into our test page refresh it our test shows up here then we don't need a test here so we're just going to delete it and then we'll go back reload our test is gone so now if you remember I said that this links list was in a different panel so in here we'll click to our regular site scroll down you have a list of links like it goes to the catalog Nebraska memories, Nebraska access the main state of Nebraska page and you can customize different links but when you go into your widgets here you have your links but none of the links that were in the sidebar are actually appearing in this widget section here so where do they come from so if you want that links list WordPress actually put it in a separate links panel so if you go into your main dashboard go to links and all links and don't ask me why they put it here but there they are so if you want to add in a new resource here we'll go to add new one of the biggest ones that I've had requests there's a reason that I keep saying job skills because people have asked me a blog for adding job skills resources and using computer digital devices and adding those resources to the website so I apparently have it on the brain because I've gotten questions about it so much but you'd be able to type in the name of what you're looking for I'll just I'll keep the theme and say name job skills then you would say the web address that will GCF learn then you would navigate to the website copy it and pop it in here and the description will just and then you can add a category and so this blank here will make it so that when you click open that link it will open up in a new tab and this is just a good default so that people are it's easier for people to be able to navigate back to your website once they're done using the resource so we'll add the link and then I will go and when I'm looking for is this little dot will bounce back and forth while it's loading so I was waiting for that dot to stop bouncing before I go over to the regular page I'll reload it job skills so that description when you hover over it that is what will appear so that people know what it is so now really quickly I kind of went over the basic skills of what you would need to learn I'll I put in a link to access the different tutorials on here this link will send you over to the Nebraska libraries on the web there is a series of tutorials that you'll have a access to a quick start guide that will run you through the different steps to building out website content and the major stuff you need to know if you're in Nebraska or even if you're out in Nebraska if you just have a question you can set up like an over the phone orientation or just ask me stuff and there are so the refresher tutorials is just a series of stuff that people commonly need that will get you started or be able to refresh you after you've done an orientation so the biggest question I get is what in the world is going on with the Gutenberg editor? I need help so this will give you a step-by-step guide overview of what in the world this thing is and what to do with it this will tell you the basics of what WordPress is how it works why you'd need it this will go over the themes how to change and test out different themes how to add blog postings, edit what in the world is an RSS and it tells you pretty much all the common basics and links you over tutorials that will give you a video or a description of how it works and then it's mostly all just practice so that's something that some people and I know I used to you worry about what if I break it what if I put something wrong out there we'll just like you just show it's all fixable you can always take down what you put out undo the page that you added or the wrong content nothing is in stone yeah now the delete button is my favorite feature yeah don't be intimidated by it yeah so now once you're working this out just make sure that you know who is going to be doing it and that they know and feel comfortable with what they're doing and and start building out a schedule and start building the habit if the website is new to you it's going to take some time to say okay we're we're running circulation we need to run check-in we need to open up the library we need to do all these main things that we already do and we need to fit in this one extra thing so where's this going to fit and who's doing it and then when we know who's doing it start sending calendar reminders to just start building that habit instead of just hoping that the person remembers to do it and start building out like a little list of options for what you might want to refresh on the site and major things that this person is supposed to pay attention to so that they're not trying to focus on eight million different things and learning all of websites so that they just know what's important and what they should put off in little checkbox to say this is what I need to do and then I go on with my day and more like this is one of the more important things is you just put a ton of time energy and resources into revamping or building a website in the first place people don't know that you have a website you went x number of years without a website so now people need to know that they can go to it so start marketing offline and put out flyers put out word of mouth start telling people and put out hand out business cards and business cards with your web address on it and start linking over to through local businesses put it out in the coffee shop just schools schools are a big one and you can also simultaneously do online but don't just market on your own library website because remember people don't necessarily know your website exists yet so they wouldn't know to go to your website to find the marketing for the website yeah and so if you start hosting events on other popular websites like if you go on to Eventbrite or you go on to meetup.com or you go to just wherever people are already going go there and start hosting mini library events and all on other platforms outside the library and then start funneling people over to your new library website and start putting links to different resources like you can go on to local facebook pages and then when someone asks the page in another group that you happen to belong to start linking them over to free library resources that'll send them over to your library website and just start building out that connection panel that says or a thing come over here and whatever your preferred social media is go to town you have to do it and you got to do it repeatedly you can't just down something you're doing once and hope that they remember it even a month or two weeks from now it's okay to nudge nudge nudge All right so I threw a ton at you but if you happen to have and it is I'm a little over but we started a few minutes late I'll call it close enough yep so if you have any questions my contact info is on the screen and I will also put a link out to these google slides yep and it will also be included when we have the recording that goes up as well in our archives so if you have any questions type them into the questions section well Amanda's doing this get her slides link out there to you we did have a couple that actually just came in so yeah we can like I said we start a little late and we'll go as long as it takes to answer all the questions you have if you have anything you desperately need to ask Amanda right now get it in there if not of course you know reach out to her call or email her with any questions you may have after let's see what we have she says okay here's the first one you mentioned the importance of checking privacy security of the WordPress plugins curious what is your process for doing that how do you actually make sure that they are safe to use so my first screen is to go to the plugin website and I will check the comments because nine times out of 10 someone will give a tip off in there that shows that either like the security is not up to par it's not being updated and you want to check the update schedule of the plugin if the plugin is new has only been updated once I wouldn't use it yet and it's because we don't know if you install this plugin and that developer doesn't keep updating that plugin and keep updating it with the updates to WordPress you're going to get vulnerabilities let somebody else test and be the guinea pig yeah so make sure there's a consistent update schedule and the developer responds to troubleshooting promptly and there's also another security vulnerability checker let me see if I can find it on here and I'm going to open see there is a security check that's not the one I'll find that link that I use all the time and then I'll put it into the blog listing or into the slides that I embedded were there any other questions besides that one yeah there's a couple actually another question is related to plugins that I jumped down to since that's what we're talking about are the plugins available on the free version of WordPress some are some aren't so WordPress.com has fewer options and fewer customizability options than WordPress.org so you will see some differences in plugins between .com and .org and if you are using the free WordPress.com option that you don't have a customizable domain for so they will be a little different it'll depend yeah yeah one other question we had here let's see about accessibility they manage a couple of professional WordPress based sites for a professional group or two so you select an accessible theme it's time to review a couple of them for updating how are you building an accessibility in your design process always looking for tips about that and so how do you figure out if it is accessible or not and then are as public entities are Nebraska libraries required to or slash encouraged to have accessible sites I don't think we don't have a requirement of that it's definitely encouraged to check on accessibility it's something that we've had actually lately in the last few months or two we've had a couple of different multiple encompassed live shows about accessibility on your website and in your training and things so you can definitely go back and look at some of those specifically for WordPress Amanda what would you recommend about that so fun fact I used to work for the talking book in Braille library that is downstairs in the library commission and I also worked in a nonprofit called beyond vision so a lot of that was accessibility I worked with 85 90% blind visual impaired people so that was a lot of what I did and so in terms of accessibility images are a big one that you want to go through and check through so in images I'll go into my media library here in WordPress so there is an alt text on here and the alt text is what a screen reader would read out in place of the image so we go in here and this alternative text in here is where you would want to put in a description fantasy book scene and you won't see this on your screen but a screen reader will pick it up and when you click off of it you'll see a little saved up here in the upper right hand corner but there is not a save or update button on here so that's one like your first major check on here the next thing that you want to do is we'll go into pages all pages and wait for this to load we'll add new here and you want to make sure that your heading hierarchy is working so you have your main title and then in here you'll want to add a plus sign you'll go into the heading now you want to look for this h1 h2 you want to start with h1 as your default and the heading one largest size paragraph for heading one and then you want to add in a separate heading that goes to another category you'll go into heading two for heading two and heading three so what I'm displaying on here is that you want to make sure that these headings are in a relevant order because this is what your screen reader is going to be reading so when you open up a screen reader there's a shortcut key that will open up a little menu of headings that are available on the website that you are navigating and that menu of headings is organized based on this heading one heading two heading three thing and it will organize this in order of importance and in order of it reads that coding on there so if you just choose a heading based on the size the screen reader won't know what is going on and the user won't be able to navigate it properly so that's why it makes a big difference for screen readers which heading you choose and how these are nested together so if you so this is all for one major topic then these are mini subtopics but if you want to shift back over to a new topic and now the screen reader will be able to read these heading one and heading two together and then the screen reader will be able to open up these separate headings if you want to test this there is a free screen reader called nvda and it's available through nvaccess and you'll be able to download this for free and find out what a screen reader will do when you are using it regular screen reader users usually use JAWS this is what we use to be on vision it's a paid version but it has more bells and whistles but it's easier to test with nvaccess than it is with JAWS because JAWS is paid but it will still be able to do the same testing there's other accessibility stuff that's available you can reach out to me but I've actually done a whole session just on accessibility for websites so if you have more questions about it yeah do we have any other questions in the queue just checking another section here no it doesn't look anybody has any other desperate questions right now oh she just says thank you good to know I'm using the biggies of alt text and headings yeah and we recommend nvda to our students who want something free it is a really good one and if you orca is also another one but I like nvda better though oh and also while I'm thinking about it there's different tools I use from what I'm developing by hand than what I'm developing one like when I'm putting something together for wordpress but yeah this one's better for html maybe put something together specifically for wordpress anyway do we have any other questions on there and looking at thing right now I think we'll wrap it up then since we're getting a little more into the next hour and that's okay yeah as you said Amanda's out there definitely reach out to her if you have any questions the recording and the slides will all be available like you said this was a lot to go through I'm going to pull over to my screen quickly but that's how we do this and record everything so you can come back and watch this and go through the slides like you said this is a big practice play around with your website kind of thing don't be afraid to come up with something new put it in there look at if you don't like it fix it you have no idea how many times I've gone through iterations of what a page will look like or not even a whole slide or just a blog post itself well no I don't like that picture there that graphic I'm going to move it here it is what it is until you're totally done and that's fine so thank you I think we'll wrap up today thank you for pretending thank you Amanda for being here again this Wednesday for our pretty sweet tech the archive as I said the show has been is being recorded and here on our main website our archives are listed right beneath our upcoming shows if you click on there the most recent one is at the top of the list and then you just go backwards from there so by the end of this week today's show should be will be on here at the top of the list I'll let everyone know who logged in today and register for today's show show that is when it's available we'll have a link to the recording on our YouTube page and a link to Amanda Slides Google that link that she shared to you before and also mentioned here so you can so you can follow here you can search our archives you can search our full archives or just the most recent 12 months if you want to this is because this is our full archive of Encompass Live but I'm not going to scroll back all the way because that's going to be crazy Encompass Live premiered in January 2009 so we have over 10 years worth of of archives here and we have them all here and we will continue posting them we'll continue hosting them here as long as the technology allows us to we are librarians it's what we do archive things historically it's very easy for us just to keep all these recordings up here I will just give you a note that pay attention to the original broadcast date of anything that is on here some shows will stand the test of time or readers advisory type things information that doesn't change much but some things will become outdated there will be services or products that don't exist anymore or that have changed drastically some links might not work anymore some information might be incorrect because things have changed since the original broadcast date of the show but everything does tell you when it was originally broadcast you can at least say oh this was actually in 2017 I wonder I bet you things have changed let me see that can find something more recent if you just want current info just limit your search just the most recent year 12 months anyways and you'll only get up to date current information so that is our Encompass Life Archives we do also have a Facebook page if you look here I've got a link to it I've got to open over here this is where we post reminders and updates about things when recording is available where's the last one there we go so if you'd like to use Facebook give us a like over there we also use the hashtag Encompass Live you can see it here on other social media Instagram, Twitter, etc so if you want to keep an eye on what we're doing that would be something to follow there as well other than that that wraps up today's show I hope you join us for a future episode we've got some of our shows here on the schedule I'm working on other ones to add into the calendar so do keep an eye on here and see what new ones we have coming up so thank you everybody for being here this morning thank you Amanda and well we'll see you on a future episode of Encompass Live bye