Welcome to your Proto Site! Here are some tips and tricks that will help you use this tool and contribute to this project.
General
This website is a very simple instance of WordPress, the same CMS that will power your new website as well. So entering content on this site is also a great way to get comfortable with the basic WordPress controls!
Everything on this site is extremely limited:
- No header, footer, or menus
- Pages don’t have modules, only a single text field
- No ability to place images or other media
- No custom page styles or colors
That’s all by design. At this stage, we want to focus only on creating content. The rest will come later!
Pages
Click on the Pages sidebar link to view the list of individual pages. Click any title to view or edit a page, or Add New to start a new page.
TITLE & PERMALINK
The top Title field controls the page’s large headline and the browser tab title.
Creating a title and publishing the page will also auto-generate a permalink (the page’s URL within the website). Click the Edit button after the permalink to customize it.
Your titles and permalinks don’t need to match your current site. We’ll catch any changes with redirect rules to ensure users and search engines are pointed to the correct content.
PUBLISH
To save a page, click the blue Publish / Update button in the Publish box. You can also move pages to trash with the red link.
PAGE ATTRIBUTES
The Page Attributes box allows you to assign the current page a parent. This nests pages both in the WordPress admin (on the All Pages list) and in the public permalinks:
- A page with no parent
website.com/page-1/ - A page with a parent
website.com/parent-page/page-2/
This can have benefits for organization, but is optional. Since changing a nesting structure on the live site will impact SEO, it should be finalized before launch.
YOAST SEO
Below the main content field, the Yoast SEO box gives you some basic tools to optimize your page for search engines:
- The Focus keyphrase and SEO analysis sections, as well as the Readability tab, can help you analyze and refine your page’s content.
- The Google preview section gives you a sneak peek at how Google will display your page in search results. Asher strongly recommends populating the Meta description field so you can control what text Google displays (instead of making their crawler guess). We also use meta descriptions in automated content feeds like post index pages and internal search results, so creating descriptions will benefit both users searching for your site and users already on it.
- If you want to learn more about SEO, Yoast offers both free and premium training courses.
As with the page’s content, any work in the Yoast SEO fields will carry over to the full site! It will also be able to be edited at any point post-launch.
Content field
COPY / PASTE
If you are copy/pasting text from another website or program (such as Word), you might accidentally insert extra formatting or code (sometimes even invisibly!). This can slow down your page, break the design, or cause accessibility errors.
To avoid this, always paste using Ctrl + Shift + V (or on Mac, Cmd + Shift + V) to place content with no formatting. Once placed, format as desired using the available WordPress tools. You can also use the toolbar button “Paste as text” for the same functionality, or the “Clear formatting” button to clean something up after it’s been pasted.
Also, watch out for manual line breaks like the ones in this paragraph.
These can disrupt normal text flow (particularly on mobile)
and happen especially often when copying from a PDF.
If you notice text wrapping to the next line for no reason,
try resizing your window
to confirm a line break, and manually delete it.
HEADING ORDER
If you use the formatting dropdown to create headings, make sure to follow the logical heading order of H2 before H3. Using headings in a non-semantic order can hurt your SEO and accessibility. You can check your heading numbers with the formatting dropdown, or by the visual markers on the front-end preview.
You can also emphasize text with the bold or italic buttons in the toolbar. These are great ways to create visual emphasis without disrupting your heading structure.
NOTES
You may want to adopt a standard format for “internal only” notes you’re going to circle back to later. Such as putting an entire section in italics [ or within brackets ] or using an uncommon repeating character you can search for later like ZZZ.
You can also insert horizontal lines (like the one below) to indicate a planned section/module break.
Users and sharing
For someone to edit content, they need to have an Editor user account tied to their email. If you need additional Editors, contact Asher and we’ll get them set up for you.
Viewing content is not currently restricted. The entire site is set to noindex, so it shouldn’t be discovered by search engines. If you share the public URL for this page (https://proto-content.com/readme/), anyone with that link will be able to view its content. This is the recommended way to share any pages that need feedback/approval from people outside the Editor user team.
That’s all for now. Happy content generation!