It is increasingly common to post the latest news on a website first and then send out a link to the content via social media. This means it is increasingly important to present your news in a clear and effective way.
The news template can also be used for publishing any information on a regular basis like a blog or company data.
The more often the content on your website is updated, especially if it is linked to social media posts, the greater the likelihood it is to attract more visitors and to consequently improve your website's prominence in search engine results. The news area is designed to make this whole process easier.
Articles are made up of 2 parts:
- The article
- The category
The process of creating a news article has some similarities to creating a page. You will need to fill in the following information to create your new news article.
- Title: As it describes, this should be the title of your article.
- Slug: This is the URL for the article. Much like when creating a page, this populates itself automatically depending on the title article but can be changed if desired.
- Meta description: This description also automatically populates itself, but you can write whatever is relevant here for SEO purposes (perhaps the first paragraph of the article).
- Date posted: You can choose a date and time on which the article should be posted. This can be in the past or in the future. In the latter case, the article will not be visible until the future date. If you leave this field blank, it will automatically adopt the date and time that you manually publish the article.
- Date expires: You can choose a date and time on which the article should “de-publish” itself. This won’t delete the article from your site, just make it invisible to users.
- Teaser: You can use this to include a tagline or teaser for the article.
- Body: This hosts the main content of the article. The editor is essentially the same as adding general content on a page. See the text page for an explanation of the text editor.
- Categories: You can tick one or more categories that this particular article falls under. By default, you will only have the category “News” listed, but more can be added.
- Choose an image: Choosing an image will take you to the File Manager, where you can pick an image that will act as the banner image for this news article. If you don’t pick an image, it will default to your logo.
- Image alt text: Here you can add alt text for the image you have chosen as the banner. For more information on alt text and its purpose, visit the Images and Files page.
Having created your article, it will not yet be published on your site. Navigating to 'list of articles' will allow you to see which articles have been published and which have not. You’ll also be able to easily publish from this screen.
Categories are an easy way to “tag” your news articles as relevant to a particular topic. You can easily add as many categories as you need for your site. Articles can be tagged with multiple categories, or just one.
You can also display only articles of a particular kind on a page. For example, you might distinguish between more light-hearted blog posts and more important legal company news. Categories allow you to separate out these two news types and keep them in distinct areas of your website.