Class: English

Congratulations, you now have a website. You might be wondering, “Why do I have a website?” That’s a question for a different post. Of course, having a website is a little bit of a responsibility. Here are some things that you should keep in mind now that you have one.

• Don’t post information that is too personal on your website. You shouldn’t post your address or phone number. You shouldn’t post anything that you would be upset about if everyone in the school (or the world) found out about.
• Give people a little context before you start writing. You might start a post off with something like this, “This post is a reflection on the third chapter of John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men. I wrote this when I was in 10th grade for English class.”
• People will eventually comment on things that you put on your website. If the comment looks like spam, you should delete it. If you don’t delete it, you will get a lot more spam. They target people who do not delete spam. If a comment isn’t nice, you should delete it too. You want your website to be a nice spot to visit.
• Try to avoid being negative. If there’s something that you want to write about and it sounds like a complaint, why not try to write it as a suggestion on how something can be improved instead. I’m sure you get bonus points every time your website makes the world a better place.
• Be a little bit selective about what you decide to put on your website. It should be a little more professional than Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
• What you write is more important than how your website looks, but having a good looking website says something to your visitors too. If you need help with your website, ask someone who has a nice looking website. Or you can ask at help.lincolnlutheran.org. You can also stop by the Tech Center.
• How you classify posts is important. Always click on a Class and Grade before you post. If it applies, click on one or more Categories and Interests as well. This will help other people find what they are looking for on your site.
• You can add other Interests (or delete some). You do that from the Posts menu. You can also add Classes. In fact, you’ll have to. Pro Tip: You can say item they should appear under by setting the Parent item. Once you add more Interests or Categories, remember to put them in your menu as well. You’ll find that under Appearance.
• In the Plugins menu, there are other tools that you can add to your website. But don’t keep them unless you use them, because every plugin slows your website down a little bit.  After you get good at using the basic WordPress tools, and you’ve written a few dozen posts, you can upgrade your account to have access to more tools.
• Most of the content on your website will be posts, but you can also publish pages. You use pages for things that will never (or very seldom) change. If you make a page, don’t forget to add it to your menu.
• Images can make your website more fun. Sometimes it’s easy to pick an image. Just take a picture of what you are writing about. But remember that if you use an image off the internet that you should have permission to use it. You can get images like that from Google or Flickr. Those links go to the sections of Google and Flickr image search where people put images for other people to use.

By the way, you should probably make it so that other people can’t see this post. There’s a lot of advice here, so rather than delete it, do one of these things: Change it’s Status from “Published” to “Draft”. Then it will be available to you in the admin section of your website, but people who visit your site won’t see it. Or, you could change the Visibility from “Public” to “Private”. If you do that, then you’ll still see it on your website (if you are logged in), but other people will not.