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Edlio General Refresher Webinar

Added Nov 09, 2018 •

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This is a general CMS refresher that's suited for both administrators and teachers! We discuss tips for optimizing your website and keeping your website looking fresh with frequent updates.

Show Transcript

Good afternoon everyone, thank you for joining me today for our general refresher webinar. We will be going over calendars, news, social media manager, and more. I also wanted to let you know that we have a technical support representative in the chat room who can answer any questions that you may have. This video is being recorded and it will be accessible to everyone in the Help Center so let's actually go ahead and get started. So I am just going to log into the back end here and as you can see this is our dashboard that we see when we log in. So you have a few ways to get to your modules: the first way, of course, is to just click into any of the modules here or of course you can go ahead and just click in the drop-down and access them the same way here. So let's first go into our Plan module and let's actually click into Calendars. So when we click into Calendars, you of course have the option to add your events manually. And if not, you of course have the option to integrate as well and I will go over those options in just a minute here. What I wanted to show you was when I go back to the actual website, when I scroll down, this is where all of the events will populate so if you wanted to actually view all of the Calendars that you have set up for your District, or even your school, all you need to do is click here or on "view all" and you'll be able to see your events listed here. You'll also see that you can view different calendars here as well, so if you wanted to view maybe the events, along with HR, or even just HR itself, you could go ahead and select the calendar you would like to view. You also have the option of subscribing to the calendars, so if a parent or student wants to go ahead and get notifications on their own calendar, they can click on "subscribe" and choose either one of the options here. Now let's actually go back into how we populate over these events. So on the admin side, again what I had done is in the drop-down menu, I went into Plan and Calendars, which brought me to this specific page and I'm logged in as an admin, that is why you're seeing the option of "school" and "personal." If you're a teacher, the backend might look a little bit different for you in terms of what you actually have access to, so under the "school" option, you can manually add your events, which all you need to do is actually go ahead and click on "add event" here, choose the category that you want to add the event to, so let's say just the Events Calendar, you would scroll down and of course title your event here. You could go ahead and change the time, add the location if you would like to, add your details, and you could even upload files as well. So as soon as you click "save," that would actually go ahead and add on the Events Calendar. So let's go ahead and click "save" here and I'm going to go back to the website and refresh the calendar here and we can see that it actually added the field trip event for us. Now, for those of you who are interested in the integration option, you can actually integrate with Google or 365 and the way that you can actually set that up is by, again, going into your drop down menu here, under Site Management we want to go ahead and click into Settings. And once the page opens for you, you want to go ahead and click on Calendars here and then you'll actually see the option that says "calendar integration." So you would be able to click "connect a Google Calendar" or an "Office 365 Calendar." You can connect as many of your calendars as you would like to, so here let's say I wanted to also integrate with our athletic calendar for example, I would have to go in and for each calendar I have here, of course choose the option of where you would like to integrate from. And here as well, is where you can add more categories to your calendars and all you would need to do for that is click on "add calendar." Let's say this one was a PTA calendar, for example, we would type in "PTA" and click "add" so now I can see that it actually created that PTA calendar for me. Now I'm going to go back to into Plan and Calendars, and I wanted to mention one more thing here, please remember that the school, so admins, have the option for the main calendar, to integrate or add the event manually. For teachers, if you are adding your calendar, we currently only have the option of manually adding your events. So that is why you won't see the option to integrate your calendar. So let's go back into our drop-down and let's go into our Announce module and click into News & Alerts. So News & Alerts is where you're managing all of your news posts that show on your homepage, so when I go back to our website here and I scroll down, it's going to be the News & Announcements section here. So of course if you wanted to add more posts, we would create that here under News & Alerts. Now, the reason why you are seeing this arrow here that says "from Hamilton High School" is because districts have the ability to push news to their schools - not the other way around. So if you maybe see a post that has this same option and let's say it says "from Hamilton High," for example like it does here, that means the district added it to your website, so only they can go in and edit it on there end. But of course, if you wanted to add a news post yourself, all you need to do is go ahead and click on "add news" and you would go ahead and type in a headline here so let's say this was "Back to School" for example, you could write a little short summary here, and when you scroll down, you have the option of adding content, linking to a file, or even linking to a page. Keep in mind that you can only use one of these at a time so if I wanted to add content, I would add more content here, you even have the option of embedding if you would like to and even adding photos within the content. If you have any sources to site you could of course spell that out here. If you don't have any, you do not have to worry about filling out this portion. And then you have the option of attaching files or photos, so when I click on "upload," I'll see these four options of where I can pull files or photos from. I'm just going to select my computer here and I'm just going to select one image and I'm going to see that I actually get a little orange pop-up that says "missing alt text" so this is of course important for ADA purposes. So what this means is for those who are actually visually impaired or have traumatic brain injuries, if they're using a screen reader, what this is going to do is take the text off of the image and read to them what the image is. So I would just click on the "alt" button here and I'm just going to write something very general and click save so now the pop-up will not be there anymore. When we scroll down, your last option here is your delivery options, so under "delivery options," you can post now or choose to have your news post at a later time and then you can actually have your post expire or you could just leave it as is and I'll go more into detail about that in a few minutes. So I'm going to click "save" here, and when I go back to the site and refresh here, I'm going to see that my Back to School post was created and if I click on "read more," any additional content that I had placed here when I created the post, would of course be available here and my picture is here on the side. Now, another option you have as well when you create your news post is to set it up as a homepage pop-up alert so this can be useful in emergency situations for an example, or maybe you have something specific you want to highlight. So when you create your news post and it brings you to this following page, when you click on "homepage pop-up alert," I default it set to 24 hours. If you wanted it to stay up for a longer period of time, you could course go ahead and change all of that here. I am just going to leave everything as is so I can show you what this looks like and I'm going to go ahead and click "post." So you can see here that it says it's going to be up for for 24 hours, so when I actually go back to the website and I refresh the page, the homepage pop-up alert is going to be the first thing that shows on the website when anyone comes to the site. So if they click "don't show again," it of course won't show the box, if they click "okay," that means they've acknowledged it now they're moving on, and if they of course click "read full story," that's going to take them to the landing page with the additional information that you have provided. The next option you have as well with your news, is our social media manager. So when you create a news post, you have the option of pushing the news to either Twitter or Facebook. And all you need to do for that is go ahead and click on the Social Media Manager, and what that's going to do is give you the Twitter and Facebook icon. All you need to do is click on either of them, they'll both take you same place, so what this is doing, is under the drop-down, you can also get to the Social Media Manager by going into Site Management and Settings. And, of course, clicking on the "social" tab. And this is where you can connect your accounts and pages so when you create a news post and we actually click on Social Media Manager. If there are accounts connected, it would of course take you to a page with your accounts, so you would check off which one you want to send it out to, and it'll go ahead and push the news for you there. So let's click back into News & Alerts, and if you ever wanted to change the order, you could of course go ahead and drag-and-drop the order of your news. If you actually hover over a post, you'll see that you have the option of of course editing the post, Announce - which takes you to the same page that we were on that gave you the option of Social Media Manager, Homepage Popup and so on - but then you also have the option to delete and disable. So if you click "delete," this is going to completely take it off of the website for you but if you click on "disable," what this is going to do is archive it on the back end so it won't be accessible on the website, it'll just be stored under Disabled News. So when I click "yes" here and I scroll up, when I click into "show disabled news," you'll see that it's here. So if you have a post that you maybe post every couple of months or every year, instead of deleting it and having to do it again, you could just go ahead and store it here under Disabled News, and enable it back whenever you're ready. I'm just going to click into "show active news" so I can go back into here. I'm just going to delete the popup I created. And districts again, I wanted to mention that you do have the option to push news to your schools, so if for some reason you do not see this option, please contact tech support so we can get that turned on for you. Now, let's go back into our drop-down and we're still under Announce here, and let's click into Email Sender. So Email Sender is a way for you to actually send emails through the back end and in order to do that, if you've never set it up, you'll see an option that tells you to "manage your account." So you're of course going to want to go in and connect your emails here so that when you click "new email," we actually have templates here that you can choose from. Two templates that we like to highlight that we offer are the one where you can actually include your events, so this would allow you to actually pull from the Calendar that you have posted to the website, and of course the "include your news" option which would allow you to pull from any news post you've created. So you would click on the template here and click "continue." This first box of course is adding your text and the last box here as well. But this middle box is where you can actually click "add news stories" and actually go ahead and click as many as you would like for it pull over. And when you click "continue," this will of course bring it to your page to enter in your recipients. You can add your subject and of course choose the option of "send now" or "send later" and you can also preview what your email looks like, so it'll show you what it looks like on a desktop and on a mobile device. So let's go back into Announce and let's talk about Text Alerts and Voice Messages. So these are actually an add-on feature that we offer where you would be able to send either a text alert or of course a voice message out if in case there was a very important message you needed to get out or of course an emergency. So if you're interested in knowing about text alerts and voice messages, you can go ahead and contact us and we'll definitely give you more information in regards to text and voice messaging. So we're still at the Announce module, and let's go into our Contact List. So Contact Lists are a way for you to store any current lists that you may already have on the back end. For example, it could be maybe parents emails, or you have a specific volunteer list and you want to create that and have it on the back end. Keep in mind that these lists cannot be seen by the public, it's only on the back end. And admins actually have access to see everyone's list, where as teachers, you would only have access to your own. In order to create contact lists, all you need to do is click on "new list," go ahead and title your list here, click on "add" and you of course have your option of clicking "add by single contact" which is going in and manually entering in the contact's information or, if you already have this list somewhere, you can go ahead and click "add in bulk," and if you actually download our CSV template, you could fill out the information, drop the CSV file in here, and as soon as you click "add," that'll of course go ahead and populate this list for you. You can of course create as many list as you would like to here on the back end. So now let's go into Page Management and our Password Protected Areas. So if you maybe have an area on the website that is specifically towards staff, or there's content on there that you don't want everyone to have access to, you actually have the option of password protecting as many areas as you would like, all you need to do here is click on "new area" and make sure that you actually name this. So I'm going to do a Test here for example, because the more areas that you add as password protected, if you don't change the name, all of them are just going to list out as a "new area." So just make sure you title them so you know which one it is. Under What is Protected, we're going to want to click "add pages and features." Any pages that you have on the back end or of course the features that we offer on the website, you're going to be able to password protect as many of these as you would like to. So I'm just going to go under Miscellaneous and under About. I'm going to password protect the Mission Statement just to show you what this looks like. I'm going to click "add selected" and then of course I want to go under Who has Access, so when I click on Who has Access, under Bulk Actions you can see that anyone that you have listed under user management, if you click Add All Staff, it's going to bring everyone over. if this was just maybe for a few people, you can of course search here and add them one by one. Then you of course want to scroll down and click on "save." So now when I actually go to the website, I know that under About is where my mission statement is, so when I click on Mission Statement, I'm going to see this following page which shows that it's a password protected area, you need to sign in in order to view the content on the page. So if someone of course doesn't have an account, there're not going to be able to view the content. I'm just going to sign in here, so when I click "sign in," then I'll be able to see all of the content on the page. And of course if you ever want to delete any password protected areas, you can just go ahead and click on the delete icon and that'll go ahead and of course remove it for you, so now when I actually go back to the site and I click on Mission Statement, I don't have to enter in credentials to of course view the content. Let's go into our Media module and I wanted to mention that you're shuffles that you have here, which is of course your images that you have running on the back end, just as a best practice, we wanted to remind everyone that under Upload Media, make sure that you're shuffle dimensions that you view them here because tech support has gone in and actually set the dimensions for you so if you can size them somewhere else before you bring in the images to these dimensions, you're more than welcome to do so and if not, when you upload a photo, you really only have the option to just go in and crop within the dimensions. So just make sure to look at what you're dimensions are specifically. Another area we wanted to mention is under our Community, it's our Forms add-on feature. If you're interested of course in knowing about Forms, since this is an add-on, you're more than welcome to reach out to us and we'll provide you with of course the information. But what Forms is used for is if let's say you have a specific admissions form or you wanted to build out a specific form you like to use for the site, you would actually be able to do that here and parents or students would be able to fill out the form on your website and your responses would actually populate here. So when you click on New Form, you see that you have all of these options of what you can actually add to build out your form and we do have some exciting new enhancements that will be coming out to Forms, so please let us know if you have any questions or if you're interested in more information about Forms. So let's go back into our drop-down and let's go under Site Management and User Management for a brief moment here. User Management of course is how you are populating all of your users on the back end and of course your staff directory, so if you wanted to of course add a new user, all you need to do is click on "create a new user," fill out the information that is bolded here, and of course any additional information. You could select them as a website admin or of course give them specific editing access if let's say it was the science teacher and you only wanted them to edit their science page, you would give them editing access to science. And the other area that User Management ties into is how to categorize your staff directory, so you can categorize by "none" which means in alphabetical order, you can categorize by user type which means anything that you select under here, that is how it will display and of course your last option you can categorize by categories and sections so anything that you check off here under staff, that is how it would populate your staff directory. And of course to change how you categorize, we go into Site Management and Staff Directory, and what you want to do is click on the Directory Options and here is where you'll find your options of None, User Type, and Section. And of course you can change your directory name here, choose additional information you want to display and of course change the layout of the staff directory and as soon as you click "save" that'll of course go ahead and reflect on the website for you. So since this is actually categorized by section, you can see that all of the sections that we had on the back end, are populating here. The last area that I wanted to cover here for you is if we go under More and click into Stats, this is a great place for you to get a general overview of the activity on the website so you can see that as you start submitting tech support tickets, you'll be able to view them here, you can get a general page view count, and of course view your top 5 active users, but another option that we like to mention is actually connecting the website with Google Analytics so that would give you more of an in-depth analysis of the traffic that's actually coming into your website so if of course you're interested in connecting the site with Google Analytics, you can go ahead and sign up here and there's a little information here as well. So thank you so much everyone for joining us today, please remember that you can always reach out to us for any additional information that you may need and also if you're interested in information for scheduling a training for your district or your school, please reach out to our client success team at clientsuccess@edlio.com. We hope everyone has a wonderful day and weekend and thank you so much again for joining our My Edlio Webinar today.

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