This is the blog post that accompanies the following video:
Transcription:
The most important part of any website is the content. In this video, we’re going to create 7 pages that most educational institutions and NGOs will want to have: a home page, an events section, a programs page, an FAQ page, a news archive as well as about us and contact us pages. At this point, you should have a domain with WordPress installed and user accounts created for the people who need them. If you don’t, check out the earlier videos in our tutorial series.
To get started, log in to your website with your editor account. Let’s start by creating our homepage with a bit of basic content. Most themes will have a separate homepage template, so we won’t worry too much about this page for right now. Go to the “Pages” section of the WordPress admin, and click on the “Add New” button at the top of the page. We’ll call our page “Home” for now by clicking the title bar and typing in “Home”, but you could title this page your business’ name as well. Next, write a couple of quick sentences describing your business, and hit the “Publish” button. Congratulations, you’ve just added the first page to your site!
Next, let’s make the page that we just created the homepage for our site. To do that, go to “Settings” -> “Reading” in the WordPress admin menu. Click on the “A static page” radio button, and select “Home” from the “Front Page” dropdown menu of the pages on your site. Scroll down, and click the “Save Changes” button. Next, open up a new tab, and navigate to your website. You should now see the page you just created when you enter your site’s URL.
Great. Next, we’re going to create 3 pages that are important for most education and NGO websites. Go to the “Pages” section again, and click on “Add New”. This time we’ll title our new page “Events”. The format of this page depends on whether your institution holds events frequently or not. We’re going to set up our events page for an institution that holds infrequent events. If you hold a number of events each month, skip this page for now and instead you can set up an events page in the same way that we set up the “News” page later in the video.
Our fictitious organization holds 3 events annually, a spring annual meeting, a summer gathering and a winter carnival. We’ll add titles and descriptions for each of those events in the content editor and then below, we’ll put the dates for our next event. If these change annually, make sure that you remember to keep them up-to-date in the future. Hit the “Publish” button, and our events page is done for now.
We’ll create a programs page by clicking “Add New” at the top of the page. Enter “Programs” into the title bar, and then describe your programs in the content editor below. The content is very dependent on your organization, but it’s important to keep in mind the kind of information your visitors will want to know. This could be what makes an education at your institution special if you’re an educational institution, or it could be who benefits from your programs if you’re a non-profit. At the bottom, we’ll add a line asking visitors to contact us if they’ve got any questions about our programs.
Next up, we’re going to create a “News” page. Our news page is going to consist of blog posts that get added each time we’ve got news to share. For the time being, create a new page and title it “News”. In the content section, we’ll add a line describing the page and mention that the news section will be coming soon. Once you’ve done that, hit the “Publish” button.
That’s it for pages that are really specific to educational institutions and NGOs. We’re also going to add three pages that most sites need: an about us page, which talks about the history of your business and what makes you unique, an FAQ page, so that common questions can be answered quickly for visitors, and a contact us page, so that visitors can get information on how to contact you by phone along with listing your address.
Let’s create our “About Us” page. We do it in exactly the same way as the other pages, just this time we’ll add a couple of paragraphs of content, and a bullet point list explaining our values. Things you usually want to mention in an “About Us” page include things like when you opened, what the unique history of your institution is, what you offer that is unique compared to other organizations doing similar work, and any specialties you might have. We’ll also add in a bullet point list, talking about our values. To do that, click on the “Bulleted List” button. We’ll list our values as “Courteous” and “Community-Oriented”. Hit “Publish”, and then press the “Add New” button.
For the FAQ page, we’ll just put in our title “Frequently Asked Questions” and then add a sentence saying “FAQs coming soon” before hitting publish. We’ll be adding in FAQs using a plugin in a later video.
Finally, we’ll add a “Contact Us” page. The format of this page depends a bit on the type of institution you run. If you’ve got a brick-and-mortar building, it might make sense to list your address along with your phone number. Most organizations will want a contact form, so that visitors are able to get in touch with you easily to have their questions answered. We’ll go over adding a contact form in our plugins video as well, but for now, it’s probably a good idea to add a phone number at the very least. If you want to add an embedded map showing the location of your organization, we’ve linked to our video of it in the description.
That’s it for the basic content of your educational or NGO site! In the next video, we’ll choose a theme, customize it with your color scheme and pictures of your organization, and build a proper homepage for your website.
