Pages and navigation
Pages form the backbone of your website and host all of your content. To add new pages to the website and have them be accessible to users is a two-step process:
- Create your page.
- Add your new page to the navigation.
Under the Pages tab you have four options:
- Create a page
- Page list: Simply a list of all pages currently on your website with some pertinent information as to when they were created, last updated, and who they were created by.
- Page categories: You can create new page categories here.
- Navigation
In the Admin Area, click create a page to begin the process of creating a new page for your website. You will be presented with the following options:
- Page title: Whatever you’d like your page to be called. This should be clearly indicative of the page content as this name will appear in your browser tab and search engines.
- Page URL name: This self-populates based on the page title that you chose, though it can only contain letters and numbers (no spaces or special characters). You can edit this URL if you need to.
- Page template: You will always have access to two templates (sometimes more, depending on your needs). By default the “SubPage” template will be selected, as you will most often be adding pages which have the sub-page layout. You can also create pages with the layout of your home page: the “MainPage” template.
- Page category: Pages can be hidden from various users if you’d like (for example, hiding information behind a login portal). To do this, you should change your page category from “general” to “registered users only”. Pages that have the “general” category are visible to any users who have the URL for the page. You also have the option to fully customise access rights for a particular page. This should be used in tandem with user roles to create pages only accessible to certain user types. See the users page for more information.
Additional settings
- Meta keywords: You can add keywords which only the browser can see. This can be used to help with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), but is not essential.
- Meta description: Very similar to meta keywords, in that it is only visible to the browser and can help with SEO. It is similarly non-essential.
- Head content: Allows the user to add specific script tags into the <head> of the HTML page. This overwrites what is in the Global head content variable set in the Manage Site Settings page. This setting is only available to the 'Super Users' role.
- Canonical Tag: If there are multiple versions of the same page (e.g. regional pages), then you can use this to tell search engines which page is the main page so search engines do not see duplicated page content. This is helpful for SEO purposes and also helps when viewing Google Analytics.
- Hide page from search results: This allows you to hide the page from appearing when a user searches for it within your website. This can be helpful if you need to keep some pages hidden from general users. This feature also hides the page from search engines. (If the page has already been indexed then it can take a couple of weeks for search engines to reindex the site and remove the page.
- Duplicate content from existing page: This can be helpful for following the particular layout/theme of another page. When you tick this box, you will be given a dropdown menu from which you can choose the page you wish to duplicate.
Having entered all of this relevant information, you have two options:
- Save and add content: Save and go directly to the page, allowing you to add and/or edit the content on the page.
- Save and go to page list.
Having created a page, it will not be easily findable by a general user. To do this, you will need to add the page to your navigation/menu.
Adding your new page to your navigation structure is crucial if you want users to find it. Of course, if you want your page to be hidden, you can skip this step.
Adding a page to the navigation is quite straightforward. First, you’ll want to go to Navigation under the Pages tab in the Admin Area. Having done this, you’ll see the hierarchical structure of your website on the left hand side. From here, you can click the dual arrows to the left of each page name and move them above/below other pages. You can also click on the page to modify how the link works.
To add new pages to your navigation, look to the right-hand side, where you’ll see a grey box. You have several options here for adding a new page:
- Choose a parent link: Choose where your new page should sit within the hierarchy of the site. Note, this will always be “home” by default, but you can change this to be more deeply embedded with sub-pages.
- Link URL: Choose which page you want to add to the navigation: choose your new page from the drop down.
- Link name: Choose a name for this link as it will appear in the navigation/menu. By default, this will be the same as the page title, but you can change this if you with.