Notes for community web site editors
These notes are a work-in-progress. We'll add information as it is needed. Contributions welcome.
Trentham group accounts - what you can use
Your group can
maintain your own web pages, a calendar (which can also have the events
displayed within the main Trentham calendar), your own
Trentham email address, eg. groupname@trentham.org.au along with
many
other useful tools.
We'll also publish some tips for some of these tools:
- Gmail
- Calendar
- Picasa photos
- Docs
The tips below are for getting started with web page editing.
Preparation of content
- Prepare your text in a word processor.
- Use spelling and grammar checkers.
- Copy and paste text into a plain text editor, then into website pages.
- On Windows - you might use Notepad, on Mac, TextEdit (with 'Format', 'Make plain text' selected.)
Information structure
Keep your text as brief as possible. Headings help make web documents fast to scan read. You can even lead every paragraph with a short heading.
Dot points can also provide simply structured brevity.
Point of View
As a community site, it is important to maintain a '
neutral point of view', and to diplomatically consider issues of potential contention.
Our Trentham web site administrators will either remove content or pages that do not meet this requirement, or offer guidance for editing.
Privacy
Please do not include contact details and personal/property identification without explicit permission from respective people. Take care within text and photographs to not disclose identity unless explicitly approved.
Contact details: Your group email address may be more practical for group emails rather than a group member personal email address. Forwarding can be set up.
Copyright
All content, for example text and photographs must have copyright clearance - ie. be owned by you or by someone who has given explicit permission for you to publish it to the website. Public domain content is OK.
You may wish to assign specific copyright permissions to documents, graphics or photos that you upload or link.
Preparing photos and graphics
Be very selective. It's best to have one or two perfectly relevant pictures than lots that might be. Any images will need to be prepared to a suitable size(dimension) and compressed to keep the file size as small as possible. Please only upload prepared photos to the web (rather than large original/high resolution photos.)
If you have quite a lot of photos, please use the photo management tool to store the photos. It is called Picasa. (If you are already using another facility like Flickr, that's fine, though it will need a little more effort to insert the photos into pages.)
Uploading your photos
You can do this when you are editing a page. Go to the 'Insert' menu, select 'Drive', then 'Image', then lower on the menu that opens, select 'Upload images', then browser to select the photo you want, or drag a photo from your computer directory to the upload window.
If you want to upload more than one image, you first need to load photos to Drive, Picasa or Google+
You can upload a collection of photos to 'Picasa web albums', sort them into albums, add information and categories. When you what to insert a photo into your web page, there's a menu that will let you browse your Picasa collection.
You can also assign the Creative Commons copyright permissions for your own photos.
Google provide some tools to help upload large numbers of photos including a free application called 'Picasa'. You can download it and use it to help
manage your photo collection and do batch uploads. The current version (Oct 2010) however seems buggy. (Tip: Reference the help files before you start using it so you know how it is supposed to work.)
If you are on a mac, the mac uploader, listed below, works well for uploading large collections.
Dimensions for photos and graphics in our web site.
- Small thumbnail images - 50px x 50px
- Mediums sized pics - width 80px
- Larger Pics - width 200px
Making a slide show
First compress, then upload your photos to Google 'Photos'.
(Click the top left website title, then the arrow that shows. Photos can be found at the end of the menu list. (Other items include mail, calendars, maps etc. It is also called Picasa. You might like to organise the photos into an album for the slideshow.) Important, otherwise your pictures wont be visible on the website - With the set of pictures displayed, click on the 'Actions' then 'Album Properties' menu and (at the bottom) set the 'Visibility to 'Public on the web'.
Go back into the website, where you want to insert the slideshow, click the 'Insert' menu, select 'Picasa Web Slideshow', then click the set of photos you want (from the next pop-up window). Give your slides show a title and you are done.
Working in the web site
Our web site is a collaborative effort. You or your group may be assigned access to edit the web site. Editors can make new pages, edit and delete them. Controls are limited. Please only edit your own pages within the site and contact other editors if you notice their pages need an edit. We offer training sessions to editors to introduce you to the site.
Login
- Go to the Trentham web adress: www.trentham.org.au
- Down the bottom left of the page, click 'Sign In'.
- Enter your trentham email address and your password. (We'll supply them to you).
- This login gives you access to edit the site, and to your groups email, calendar and other options (links at top left of page).
Making pages and adding content
- Before you make a page, plan it's name, and which page it will be linked from. Use brief descriptive names.
- Browse to the page you want to edit (or link a new page from).
- Click 'Edit page' or 'Create page'.
- Copy your prepared PLAIN TEXT (from notepad or textEdit) into your page, or if you have only a short edit, type it directly into the page.
Formatting the page
It's important to keep the formatting as simple as possible. Pages will stay more readable, and look more 'clean and consistent'. Too much variety and contrast tends to make pages distracting. So, if you need to highlight something, simply use the bold, or chose a colour that matches our site colour scheme. (Avoid colours that are the same as
links)
- Use the 'Format' menu to assign 'Sub-heading H3' to your headings.
- To make a link, click 'Link' and follow the prompts.
- To insert a picture, slideshow, map, text box, post box etc. click 'Insert' and select your option.
- You can change your page layout from the 'Layout' menu. It's best to do that before you have inserted content.
- Google help - editing
- Google help - inserting pictures, maps, etc.
If your formatting gets 'out of control', try selecting it all, then selecting 'Format', 'Clear formatting', then reapplying the formatting you want.
More detailed tips
- Click the Help link in the top right corner. (when you are logged in)
- Look for information related to things like pages and attachments.
- You don't need information that sounds like it's about site setting up and management.
- If you are keen, there's plenty of great information on the web about writing for the web, and publishing tips.
The best way to learn is to just try things out - either in your own pages or we have a 'practice' site available that is not public.
