Posting guide

This is a quick guide for posting to the new website. It assumes a basic knowledge of how to put up a WordPress post. If you need more help, have any questions or spot any errors contact Alan or Linda.

The new site’s structure and performance is governed by the categories and tags attached to posts so it is very important to follow this guide, ESPECIALLY on categories.

  1. Words. As before, prepare words and images before you start to post. It is a good idea to upload the images before adding the text – it makes things easier in the end.
  2. Images. Resize/edit images before uploading (you almost certainly have the tools to do it on your computer – see below)
    • Resolution should be 72 dots/pixels (ppi) per inch. This is the default resolution of most smartphones
    • Width of landscape and square images should be 1000 (one thousand) pixels
    • Jpeg quality should be “low”
    • These settings should give you photos below 100kb
    • All posts MUST have a “featured image” and you should, without fail, check your new post live on the site to make sure you have not forgotten to include one. Vertical images rarely work as featured images. Try, if possible, to use a landscape image with space around the subject of the image
  3. Categories. These control which section(s) of the site posts appear in.
    • One is fine, Two is ideal, no more than three.  (more than this and the same story appears multiple times on pages and looks poor). If you use more than one then they should be from under different top level menus.
    • Use the second level categories(Food & Drink/Reviews, Community/Volunteering) – Do NOT select the top level categories (Food & Drink, Community, etc).
    • Think carefully about where the story will best appear
    • Everything automatically appears in “News” – you don’t need to select this as a category.
  4. Tags. These are less critical and previous advice to add as many is possible must be ignored – Tags do not help search rankings. However, they do work for our ‘on site’ search and allow us to display ‘related stories’. Maybe three or four per post, no more.
    • Whenever possible use existing tags – type the first few letters and wait for ‘autocomplete’ to bring them up (it can take a few seconds). If there is a tag close to what you want, use it.
    • Think carefully before adding new tags – be sparing, the old site had more than 10,000 tags, most of them duplicates and many either far too generic or far too specific. There’s no point in giving something a really specific tag that won’t be reused.
    • tags should all be in lower case
    • We should only add “Brixton (thing)” when it’s the formal name of something. So an article about the Brixton Brewery beers would be tagged “brixton brewery” and “beer” but not “brixton beer”.
  5. Design and layout.
    • If you can, put a landscape image right at the top of the post.
    • Do not put a deep vertical image at the top of a post as a visitor using a small screen wont see the words. If you only have a vertical image, position it on the right and make sure it will appear no wider than 300 pixels.
    • ALWAYS add fill in the “Alt text” field, even if a caption is not needed. There are three good reasons for this: People with visual disabilities need it to help them navigate sites; similarly, people who have switched off image loading on a handheld can see what the image is about; it is good for search engines like Google.
    • Always use a caption to identify people in an image; if you cannot identify them, consider not using the image.
    • Try to avoid dotting images that are less than full width around a post.
    • Don’t forget that you can use formatting such as bold, italic and colour in a post but go easy. Too much formatting makes text harder to read.
  6. Links
    • Hyperlinks are important. They can save dozens of words of explanation and increase the information value of a post. Make sure that you check the tickbox “open in a new tab”. There are different views on this but if it is unchecked, anyone clicking the link is immediately taken away from our site. We want to try to keep people on our site.
    • A tip: if you compose your posts in Word or (Apple) Pages (both recommended), you can simply add a link at this stage by highlighting the text you want to be the link, press command (Apple) or control (PC) plus K and a field will appear into which you can paste a URL – must be a full one with http or https at the start; get them by cutting and pasting our of browser URL field at top of page.
  7. Event previews. If you are posting a preview post of any event, use the post expirator fields to hide your post once the event has happened. Otherwise we will look silly as it continues to appear after the event. Don’t forget that you can time the publication of a post(s) and send someone a preview before a post is published. If you are not certain about these functions, email Alan.
  8. Image resizing tools