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How-To Guides

Use the following links to view tutorials on how to do some of the most common and/or trickiest tasks in maintaining your website. Start with the overview if you are new or scroll through the topics below to find what you are looking for. You can then search for other topics on any of the wordpress.com pages. We currently use the "classic editor," except for those using the block editor for the directory page. All the links below are for the classic editor unless otherwise noted. Make sure to search for classic editor if you search for other topics.

Overview: Classic editor guide

Topics

Anchor Tags: Creating a Page Jump

This is useful when you have a large amount of text on a page and you want users to be able to jump to the section they are interested in. The anchors would be in the section headings, and the links to each section would be at the top of the page.

  • To insert an Anchor tag (the target), use the Insert dropdown in the formatting toolbar, click on Anchor. A box will pop up for you to name the anchor. Then you would create a link (the place you want to jump from) and type in "#the-name-of-the-anchor". You don't need to directly access the html as the tutorial says.
Documents: Adding documents to your page

When adding documents to your page it is almost always best to use a pdf format. This will allow a user to view, print, or download the document, but won't force them to download it. It will also preserve the same formatting even if they don't have the program it was created with.

  • To add a JSD document from an existing JSD webpage, use the From a URL directions.
  • To add any document that is specific to your school, convert it to a pdf first, then upload it following the From Your Computer directions.
Images: Adding images to your pages
  • To remove the border from an image. Click on the image, click the pencil icon to edit. Click the gear for settings, then click on Advanced options. In the box labeled
Menus: Editing the menu
  • Access the menu from Appearance in the Dashboard
  • Do not create a new Menu - skip that section
  • For ADA compliance top-level navigation tabs do need to be pages, so don't use the clever trick to turn them into custom links. These top-level pages need to contain all the links in that corresponding drop-down menu. Make sure to update those when making changes to the menu. You can, however, customize the labels of those top-level pages (or any menu item) if you want the menu item and the page title to be slightly different.
Pages: Editing, Deleting Pages from the Dashboard view
  • Pages that are no longer being used should be deleted from your site to avoid confusion for future managers and to avoid broken link notifications from pages that are no longer being updated.
Columns: Creating a multi-column layout

Columns require the use of a plug-in called Genesis Columns Advanced. It is activated on most sites. If you do not see it in your plug-ins list and you would like to use columns (and you should), please request it, and we will activate it for you.

  • Text that spans the entire screen can be tiresome to read.
  • Instead of using tables, try columns. This will make the information look much better on a mobile device.
  • You can watch the video, or scroll down further to see screenshots and the FAQs, which might be more helpful. If you watch the video, please note that the classes he uses as examples are not set up on your site, so you will not be able to style the columns as he does, but the columns themselves are a very useful tool.