In this guided tour we will look at how the wonderful staff in the ELL department designed their brand new department website using iBlog. Here is a run-down of what they have done so far.
What makes this site stand out is the clean design, custom menu, use of Google Drive, and static homepage. Read the rest of the tour to learn how you can implement some of these concepts in your classroom website.
- Theme: ePublishing
- Widgets: Subscribe by Email, Links
- Custom Homepage
- Custom Menu
- Documents Page which links to docs in Google Drive
- Contact Us Page
- Websites and Resources
Homepage
Did you know that your iBlog website doesn’t have to show the posts on the homepage? Yep! You can have a nice clean homepage and have all your blog posts appear on a different page within your blog. That is exactly what the folks in the ELL department decided to do. To make this happen on your website do the following.
- Create two pages: Home and News
- Go to Dashboard > Settings > Reading. On the Reading Page change the Front Page Displays “Your Latest Posts” to “A static page”. Then from the drop down pick “home” for frontpage and “news” for posts page.
- Be sure to scroll down the page and Save your changes.
Custom Menu
The custom menu allows you to organize links on the site. You can add links to pages, post categories, and other websites. The nice part of the custom menu is that it is all organized by drag and drop. You get to determine the order and can even create drop downs by simply moving a link to the right. Here is an image of what a custom menu looks like.
Notice the indented menu items? These are the drop downs that are generated when viewing the website. To build your custom menu you select items from the right column and add them to the menu. Once in the menu the item can be moved around simply by dragging it from place to place. Each theme is a little different so you have to tell your theme to use the custom menu. This is especially true when switching themes.
Summary
That’s it. iBlog allows you to have control over the user experience. You can customize your site as you want. Each department and teacher has the ability to create a fantastic experience for the viewer.