Videos

Cleaning Up Your Admin Site for Winter Break [Edlio Webinar]

Added Feb 23, 2025 •

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Is your school website feeling cluttered and outdated as winter break approaches? Don't let holiday chaos spill over into the new year! This webinar is your one-stop shop for a website refresh before students return. Join our Edlio expert and learn easy-to-implement strategies to: - Declutter Your Content: Identify and remove outdated information, giving your website a clean and fresh feel for the new term. - Organize for Success: Learn how to structure your content for optimal navigation, making it easier for parents and students to find important information. - Lock it Down: Get tips on how to improve user management and security to keep your website safe. This webinar will equip you to breathe new life into your school website and ensure a smooth start to the new term.

Show Transcript

hello good afternoon good morning and welcome my name is Taylor I am a trainer here at edlio and in today's webinar we are going to be going over some tips and tricks for cleaning up your admin site for before winter break so let's go ahead and get started if you notes of housekeeping before we get into the content you'll notice that this webinar is being recorded so you're going to be able to find this recording um in a few days time along with all the other recordings I'm going to share a lot of uh different links with you today in case you want to Deep dive into further features all of those webinars have been recorded and you can find them on our help center help edlio.com I'll go ahead and put that in the chat for you all um so just a note that if you need to step away if you want to revisit this content later share with a colleague you're going to be able to find all of that information as well speaking about the chat you will notice that you will be able to see the message I just sent in the chat but you're not able to send messages in the chat yourself if you have any questions throughout our webinar you're going to want to locate the Q&A feature because that is enabled in today's webinar if you're not familiar with the Q&A feature you're going to look for your Zoom menu identify the 3 dots that more option in your Zoom settings menu and there you will find the Q&A option so drop any questions Curiosities or needs that you have in the chat 1 of our awesome folks on the client success team Dani it will be in the Q&A answering your questions as we go through and we'll also have plenty of time to demo and go over any questions during Q&A at the end so with that let's go ahead and start to get into today's content cleaning your site for winter break what could that mean well again today we're going to cover a lot of different ideas including uh some tips to refresh your homepage um updating your user management maybe you need to refresh your contact list to utilize our newsletters or email feature which is free with all cms's maybe you want to go ahead and um update your news getting all of your information fresh for the new year while going ahead and setting in for getting all of the news from this semester so far so you can reuse that next fall we'll be looking at a few features like classes forms and more to again share some tips with you so let's go ahead and jump over into our dashboard now so here I am in my dashboard of my demo site and let's start um with looking at a few areas on our homepage that we might want to scan to again identify where we can go ahead and freshen up um and bring up to date all of the information on our homepage I can always access my own page once my site is live clicking here now we have several things going on I have a a homepage alert that's been set via news about our Christmas party I've got um some homepage widgets my site navigation menu I've got my photo Shuffle maybe I want to go ahead head and refresh the photos here for the new semester we're going to go all over this in a moment now um I want to drop in the chat a link to another webinar as we won't be able to get in to all of these features in great detail today so I'm going to go ahead again and drop in the chat a link to a webinar that goes specifically into site navigation and Spotlight messages as as you're thinking about winter sports winter programming spring enrollment and you want to use these areas on your home page to go ahead and highlight that let's go through some ideas of how you can go ahead and do that and again you can always refer back to that additional webinar to Deep dive a little bit further for example on your homepage you may have some Spotlight messages you may have a spotlight message that looks like your motto here and more likely in terms of refreshing for the new semester maybe you have a spotlight message that looks like this it has um some text some areas to take folks to additional links you might have multiple spotlight messages on your homepage this is a great opportunity to go ahead and swap out information for the coming semester um maybe make a winter specific welcome message or principal Spotlight maybe you want to use our about late messages for student spotlights or to go ahead and and highlight winter sports or other winter programming all Spotlight messages are going to be able to be edited here in our hamburger menu announced on website and light messages now here you're going to see once we're in all of the spotlight messages that you have on your homepage and very simple you're just going to go ahead and open those up to make the edits that you want we'll go ahead and choose for example example our welcome message and then go ahead and swap out our text if we want to change our photo and then the link where we take folks um so we're able to go ahead and indicate if we want a read more button that's going to be um the button that shows right here in the case of My Demo sites design I'll be able to turn that read more link on dictate what it says and again where it takes folks if I have a custom link to sign up for winter sports maybe I want to go ahead and change this Spotlight message all for winter sports and go ahead and find that form to sign up or find that page that I made in page management with all my winter sports information and drop that right there going ahead of course and saving our changes at the bottom so that I've uh really eye-catching um top area on my homepage really great real estate to go ahead and grab folks attention as we enter into the semester so those are your Spotlight messages another place that you might want to consider uh refreshing for the new semester with those important links going into the winter semester are your links so here um a lot you are going to have quick links on your homepage you may have multiple you may have your social media links um some extra Links at the top for example my enroll link again this is going to depend on the design of your site but if you have some links on your site now do you want to go ahead and do a quick audit and go ahead and swap out your links for the most needed Links at this point in the school year so you want to go ahead and do that by going back into your dashboard we're going to come to our hamburger menu page management and links if you're not familiar already with your links here you're going to want to explore what topics you have each topic that has this little button that says used in site design means that I'm going to find this topic somewhere on my my homepage and so I'm going to want to make sure that all my links are great using that again really uh really helpful High real estate on your home page here to go ahead and share your most needed links going into the winter semester now we also have a few other things going on in our homepage so let's scroll back up as we discussed our Photoshop this is a really great low-hanging fruit opportunity need to go ahead and refresh your homepage very easily giving some new um photos in your homepage Shuffle we can even go ahead and have those give folks links for different programs and initiatives coming up in the winter semester it's right at the top of your homepage so it's really eye-catching in the case that you have a featured video you could also consider swapping out your featured video to go ahead and give this midyear refresh to your homepage in both cases we're going to come back to our dashboard come to the hamburger menu and go down to Media if you have a homepage Shuffle at the top of your page you're going to go ahead and click shuffles and we're going to go ahead and see all of the shuffles that are on our homepage in my case I just have my homepage Shuffle but if you have a homepage that uh you when you open your shuttles you see other categories of different shuffles and less they've been renamed they're probably going to have an intuitive name to go ahead and point you to where those photos correspond on your homepage Shuffle maybe if you have any hover but boxes you have images behind those hover boxes maybe you have an image behind your news Carousel or your uh calendar Carousel so on and so forth so go ahead and take a look at what shuffles you have and then you can go ahead and swap out the images simply by opening the shuffle of Interest we can come up here to upload media upload an image from our computer or cloud service here are all our accepted file types now pay close attention to the shuffle dimensions and make sure to use a high resolution photo that doesn't necessarily mean that that photo needs to be 15 megabytes in fact if all your photos are that large your site is going to load um a little bit slower for folks with slower internet connection so just another best practice tip to be mindful of um but you can go ahead and add or delete any images maybe we want to go ahead for example and go ahead and hit the trash can on this back to school image and go ahead and upload a beautiful photo of our campus in a winter season as we noted we can also go ahead and give captions um we can even make those captions hyperlinked here on our shovels we are going to be able to do that by coming out to slide layout and editing the caption of our photos we can go ahead and indicate our caption if we want to make that a hyperlink we're going ahead and simply click our link button here we can even make the image itself a hyper link now Pro tip I always like to go ahead and let folks know that this image is a hyperlink um by giving them some text that is a little obvious here letting them know that this that you've gone ahead and put a link there so that they go ahead and click and access that important information so let's say a photo of winter sports letting folks know to sign up for winter sports try outs going ahead and using those links features now a note on access while you're going through and doing an audit of your shuffles it's a great opportunity to also make sure all your photos have sufficient alt text alt text is what makes sure your site is ADA Compliant Americans with Disabilities Act essentially folks who use screen readers to engage with your site because of vision or cognitive impairment don't know what's going on in this visual information that we're sharing whether that's a photo or video so we want to give them a short description best ice is between 2 to 8 words of just what's happening in the image in this case my image has some burnt in text back to school so I want to make sure that burnt in text is included in my ALT text description so that looks great under about 8 or 10 words I'll go ahead and save that and again just a great moment to go ahead and make sure that your site's accessibility is up to par so that is how we can uh swap out our shuffles now if you have a featured video you're going to be able to come down to media and videos and uh come here and upload a new video if you want you'll be able to then make that video um your featured video by selecting the active star here you know which video is pulling on to your homepage in the case that your homepage design has a featured video because it's going to have this star um opaque and blue indicating that is the featured video there again more resources to learn more about our media module and uploading videos in our help center if you have any questions please don't hesitate to put them in the Q&A we'll keep going through offering some different suggestions of what you might do on your homepage here with some additional features um for example your site navigation maybe want to go ahead and do an audit that all of the links here are the most important links that folks need to find and are looking for when they come to your website and that none of your drop-downs are too long as that's going to interfere with your site's design and especially for folks who are joining on mobile might get a little a little difficult to navigate your site navigation menu so you might want to do a quick audit of that again more information in the link that I dropped in the chat but to know where to go ahead and edit your site navigation menu you're going to come down to site management and site navigation and we're going to see that whole site navigation menu accordion out here will be able to go and edit all of the items if we want to go ahead and edit um each individual item we're going to be able to do that if we want to move them around if you want to go ahead and trim your section you can always delete something from the site navigation menu coming over to your 3 dots 3 dots across the CMS is always going to let you edit that item at hand and come down and delete don't be worried um to delete something off your site navigation menu as you're not going to delete all of the lovely work you did in building this form or in building this beautiful page You're simply deleting removing that item from your site navigation menu in order to make sure that it's not too um long and interferes with the accessibility of your site there's even a little bit reminder a little reminder at the bottom here that we recommend keeping each of those top-level navigation items to 8 items maximum but never fear if you need to keep all of your links or add more you can always add a new new top-level item here and start adding those additional items below so again remember to save your changes for any changes that you want to make on your site navigation menu and if you want to dive a little bit deeper into this definitely Li check out um the resource that I dropped in the chat or come join us next Wednesday we'll be going over more details on uh site navigation all right we have some other things on our homepage here that we can consider um when we come in we have our uh homepage alert for example for a Christmas party let's say we want to go ahead and take this off um but we're going to be having our Christmas party next year so let's go over into our news I'm going to go to my hamburger menu announced on website and news and alerts and I'm going to be able to not only turn off my homepage alert but I'll also be able to go ahead um and save this entire new story for next winter I'll be able to go ahead and reuse these items now first we need to go ahead and turn off our homepage alert to edit a news item and homepage alerts we're going to come again to our 3 dots now if we want to add the news item itself we'll click edit if we want to go ahead and turn on or off a homepage alert or push this news to social or our email lists we're going to go ahead and click announced and here I can see the details to my homepage alert I can go ahead and edit that or I can go ahead and turn that off now again just a quick note if you wanted to push this story out to your social media or as an email to a contact list we'll be going over how to refresh your contact list for the end of the year shortly you're going to go ahead and use broadcast or for some of you this might say push and as social now that our homepage alert is turned off let's go back to our news home and we can go ahead and retire some of our news stories that are no longer relevant for um this school year we can go ahead and pull them off of our homepage so that our homepage um only has relevant information going forward we're making sure to use the best use of that news carousel but we can go ahead again and use these stories next year we're simply going to come to our 3 dots and unpublish our Christmas Story let's unpublish um Halloween dance maybe we've had um our our open house our Thanksgiving notifications all different sorts of stuff here that we can go ahead and unpublish now this is going to no longer exists on my homepage when I go ahead and refresh as soon as the system um updates we're not going to have going to find any of those news stories neither on my homepage here nor in the um all School news category if pulled this news category onto any inside Pages those stories are also going to be pulled from there but next year when I'm ready to publish the Halloween dance in October I'm going to go to view and publish news and here I'm going to see all of those unpublished news stories I'll be able to take my 3 dots go ahead and publish this and it's going to push that news to the top of my published news so if we go back to publish news there we go and see it there and again just a reminder every time we see these dominoes we're going to go uh be able to go ahead and change the order of our news um a recent enhancement is that when we make a news story we're going to be able to backdate that if you go ahead um and create a new story and you want to go ahead and backdate that you'll need to use those dominoes to go ahead and drag that new new story Into the chronological order that you would like it to appear in all right now we also have same homepage widgets on our homepage that we can go ahead and um consider switching up for winter break or for winter semester maybe we've uh gone ahead and um ran um closed our volunteer list for the school year and we want to instead highlight um our tours as we're opening uh spring enrollment early in the winter this year for example or maybe want to make sure at this point in the year that everyone who wants to receive our newsletter can go ahead and receive our newsletter these are both really great options to use for your homepage widgets your homepage widgets can be found um and just closing the circle if you scroll a little bit down we can see that we can publish now in the future or in the past so that is what I was referring to with backdating your news articles now looking at homepage widgets we are going to go hamburger menu page management and homepage widgets so here we're going to see the 2 home page widgets that currently exists on our site if we want to go ahead and swap those out we can simply delete the current homepage widget or we can go ahead and click it and simply edit um what is displayed now the button widget that we can go ahead and take folks to let's say that form to sign up for a tour or to a page about our uh winter enrollment let's go ahead and just drop the text that we want to display on our homepage and then you'll go ahead and simply drop that URL that form that page um whatever feature or page you're using or even if this is to take folks to a site um a link outside your website anywhere at all at all you can drop here you're going to be able to choose how widget behaves doesn't move with the page a little more inconspicuous or does it stick to the window which style these are going to be the primary colors chosen when your site was designed um so th those are the choices you see there going ahead and saving your chain now for our form widgets what we are doing is populating a contact list we'll take a quick look at contact lists in a second if you want to build those contacts list up this is a great way to go ahead and do that by situating a form widget on your homepage now when we situate a widget onto our mock-up of our homepage here our homepage of course is a lot bigger than this small square so we're just guesstimating is it going to be towards the top towards the middle towards the bottom go ahead and add your widgets fill out all those fields the behavior if you need to make any adjustments and then come down and save changes you're going to notice um that we can go ahead and Save all of our widgets and once we go ahead and do that we will see our messages up here um we'll of course take some time when we're really making these widgets for our site to make sure that all of our URLs are um good to go for taking them especially outside our website we'll want to give this secure link prefix https that we're it's we're asking folks um to give their contact information to the correct contact list that we want um to go ahead and use when we send our newsletters or our emails so on and so forth and then you can go ahead and check those out on your homepage now those are some ideas again for elements on your homepage if you are thinking about a homepage redesign you want to go ahead and switch out the elements on your page um you want a featured video instead of a Photoshop you want some new fresh elements on your homepage reach out to client success to your CSS and go ahead and ask them about redesign options the winter is a great time to consider a redesign before the busy season of the summer and back to school season to ensure that your homepage is exactly as you want it to look going into the spring summer and fall of 20125 so again reach out to your CSS if you have any questions there now those 4 books we want to contact via our newsletter feature so if we come down to mass communication you'll notice we have newsletters I also showed you when we create news that we can send the um those news items to folks emails for both of those features is why we might want a contact list so at the end of this full year want to make sure that your contact lists are ready to go for the new school year you're simply going to come to your contact lists you can go ahead and review all of the contact us that you have now as a web admin you're not just looking at your schoolwide contact lists that are either custom or a data file sync but also all of the contact lists that are created um via teacher pages AKA personal Pages or any classes that is um are being used through the class feature so if folks have subscribed to teacher pages or to any classes linked to the um teacher pages that your teachers have set up at your school you're also going to see those contact so a nice moment to do an audit of um do teachers have subscribers to their teacher lists do we want to go ahead and encourage teachers to also be able to send newsletters and it's a really awesome feature that comes included with a teacher page if you're curious to learn more about our newsletter feature that we won't be able to get into today I'm going to go ahead again and drop a another uh brief webinar from our help center that you can go ahead and review as a web admin or share with your teachers as teachers again also have the ability to send smooth letters in either case we can go ahead and select I contact us to go ahead and review if I need to edit or delete any of my contacts I can go ahead and do that if I need to add single contacts or in bulk great moment to go ahead and do that in bulk it's very simple from a custom contact list we're simply going to download the CSV template drop all of your contacts whether it's from your sis or wherever you keep your parent emails you'll go ahead and drop that in that CSV and upload and all of those will then be bulk uploaded into this contact list you also have the option as I mentioned for a data list um this is going to allow you to set up a sink with your sis um to have a regular communication of all those contacts from your sis over to your CMS do you want to learn more click here or again get in contact with your CS says they're happy to go ahead and help you explore data file contact lists you can also always get help identifying the edlio logo and going ahead and typing in your needs here um what that's going to do is go ahead and search The Help Center for you and give you the best resources to answer your question and you'll also be able to open a tech support ticket right here um with our new intercom system all right a few final tips maybe you want to go ahead and make sure that your user management is um correct going into the new semester we're going to go down to site management and up to user management now here you went on to do a few things if you don't have um the correct web admin account if you need a new webinar school or maybe a past web admin has moved on you're going to want to either create or disabled those web admins you can do that a few ways either a logging in as the super user to your CMS or if you're not the super user or don't have that super user account reach out to your CSS or to clients success I'm going to share that email in just a moment to go ahead and either create or disable that web admin for you or go ahead and reset your super admin password so you have the ability to do that yourself the other thing you might want to do is just take a look to make sure that all of these users are still at your school if they are not we can come over and um with anyone who is a regular user or a web admin again if we're logged in as a super admin we're going to be able to come over and edit and if this person has moved on from my school I'm going to go ahead and disable them I'll go ahead and follow the steps to disable that will go ahead and pull that staff member off of my staff directory if I put that person into any staff blocks using the staff block page block on inside Pages they'll be pulled off of there if they've made any teacher pages those will be hidden but you as an admin if you need to come back and access that information later say that teacher page you're still going to be able to do that as the page hasn't been permanently deleted so we always recommend disabling that user first another option you might consider is updating folks profile photos with your new school pictures from this school year maybe you didn't have a chance to go ahead and do that over the fall you could go ahead and do that now at the end of the school year or you could have each teacher update their own coming into their profile and they can go ahead and swap out their photo to have their most current photo display on the staff directory and again anywhere you put their stack blocks a few other tips I'll name quickly you might want to go ahead and in page management take a look at your redirects AKA friendly URLs see what um redirects your page is your site is using your domain is yours you can have as many redirects as you want again you can take long Pages or uh newsletters for forms any long URL and go ahead and give it a friendly URL you can read best practices here you might want to go ahead and if you uh use the classes feature your teachers uses the classes feature at your school go ahead and make sure there is an active term you don't need to have these term dates coincide with your actual school calendar these term dates are going to dictate when teachers can use the class features so we're going to want to make sure that there's con uh continuity between those dates so we don't shut out our teachers being able to update their classes over winter break or over summer break so on and so forth finally down in site management you can take a look at a few settings maybe you want to go ahead um and make sure your contact information is correct here under contact you can go ahead and make sure that all of this is correct and even go ahead and use your uh contact feature this is a contact form that you can situate as a home page widget on your site navigation menu as a link on your homepage all of those ideas we talked about today allowing folks an easy way to go ahead and contact you so you can check this feature out here classroom you want to go ahead and check that out if you want to make sure your classes feature are turned on for your teachers encourage that for the winter semester and down here at Social if you have connected Facebook or Instagram meta security policy is to need to refresh the connection every 90 days so a good moment to go ahead and make sure that that connection is active and then you don't have to worry about coming in here for a moment so with that we have shared several tips to go ahead and optimize your site for the winter semester there are some other tips here on the screen um some other webinars you can review um again review doing site navigation news and Spotlight messages um user management 101 and getting into that a little more deep than what we did today including different ways to secure your site if you want a deep dive deeper into accessibility there is a webinar for you and if you're an app customer and you want to um encourage onboarding to your app or reminding folks how they can log into your app um here is some ideas to go ahead and situate that on your Samus thanks again so much for joining today if you're interested in learning more again please reach out to your client success specialist your CSS or to client success at edlio.com

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Cleaning Up Your Admin Site for Winter Break [Edlio Webinar]

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