Following our tutorial sessions, I’ve collected some of the recurring queries here, elaborating a little on the answers I gave you during our session.
How do I make my images accessible to blind users?
Please do check on the WP tips → category where I’ve put together some posts on this and other subjects we covered in our workshops.
For this particular question – see adding ALT text →
How should I present references and media credits?
Up to you :) — however best fitting your site and content. For referencing sources, giving image credit and additional links for the media your site might include – the method of referencing should fit your site and its context.
You might decide it is important to link to the original author of a video right next to the video itself. This will be a good way of giving credit and promote the original producer.
Or you might decide that all references are best collected and included as an index of info, and then link to this page in your footer only, for example. Here is an example from the student gallery, VE are healthy, which uses this approach – check the footer for the link.
How do I set up a good menu?
Your site menu should allow quick and easy access to your content. It will likely consist of links to pages as well as categories. Links to pages will show that page’s content, i.e. one piece of content shown in its entirety.
Links to categories are different and will show the collected posts, ordered chronologically. Posts might be shown as headings with images only, or show excerpts, or full content (depending on your settings).
For your websites overall, I’d expect to find one/two links to pages and the rest are links to categories. This is a fairly typical setup and works well to present your content and an easy-to-understand manner. This very website features this kind of navigation.
The menu includes one page link only, to the ‘about’ page (which is also set to be the homepage here), and the rest are category links which will access their collected posts.
Make sure to check on the menu’s location, typically you might have 2 menus in total. One main site menu (called primary or site navigation), and possible as added footer menu which would link to additional content, such as the legally required privacy page, or your reference page, for example.
What is wrong with my site/theme?
Quite a few of you were asking about editing specific parts of content on the site, about certain odd behaviours of layout and other odd display issues. This was all likely linked to the theme you’ve chosen and the additional requirements of it.
Please do remember my advice: do not use themes which require you to install additional plugins!
While not all of those themes are bad – I think it will be too difficult for you to make a good judgement as most of you are new to working with WordPress. Hence, you might select a theme that asks you to install various plugins, configure lots of settings – could even ask you to pay for the pro version in order to enable functions and so on. Your site might end up being only partially working, still not allowing you to edit your content as you’d like and load extremely slowly.
So if you see prompts in the admin asking you to install plugins, then this could be why your theme is not fully working due to the lack of additional functions. My advice would be: find a new theme! One that works without additional requirements ~ most good themes have enough features to meet the needs of your site.
Also, see Claire’s post on what to avoid!
And remember: your content is what is most important, and ease of use is higher valued than flashy effects which often only distract.