How To Make the Best Use of This Website Template

Each area of your site homepage is preconfigured for display of the content sections that already exist in this template. By default, the lower homepage sections (titled Local News, Business, Opinion and Local Sports) will display the five most recently publised articles in those sections. The oldest four of those will display article title only, the most recent will display title, summary image and summary text.

The section titled Top Stories will display the 6 most recent article title and the 'slider' to its left will also rotate through those same stories and display the title, summary image and summary text for each Top Story.

Abut Article Photos

For stories in the article slider, it is recommended that you crop/resize photographs to 390w X 260px tall or any size larger than that where the aspect ratio stays the same. This is based on a 6 x 4 (portatit layout) aspect ratio and should work fairly well with pictures produced by many cameras.

TIP: Do not get in the habit of uploading full-sized images straight from your didgital camera to the site. Your file sizes will be over 1mb everytime. This will slow down your page load speeds, increase your bandwidth usage and cost you some storage expense in the long run. Take some time to learn how to optimize your photos for the web. Try this web search if you need tips for this. Images with dimensions smaller than noted above may be distorted by web browsers. Learning to optimize will cure many potential ills.

You may use the same photo for both the article summary and and full article display if you desire. Best practices here if you have already optimized your photos as described above are to use the full 390x260 image in the summary especially if you will copy the article to Top Stories. The [Browse Server] button found in the article editor will help you find an image for reuse if you have already uploaded a copy.

The articles will probably look best with a photo width of approximately 200px used with the article body. To get this width, feel free to use the image width selector found next to the image upload area. You may also wish to experiement some with image width here so that your readers and site visitors can see the image(s) well.

About Article Summaries

When this template was designed, it was optimized for a quantity range of words/characters in the article summaries. Best will probably be between 95 and 135 characters of text in your unformatted summary text. Any formatting and styling you apply to summary text can and probably will affect this character count. Experiment with it and view the results on the site homepage.

About Article Titles

Briefly, for the site homepage to remain visually satisfying, you will want to get in the habit of creating article titles that are all of similar length. Obviously, they can not all be the same, but to optimize whitespace and to mainatin the consistent layout, you may need to modify titles to make them longer or shorter.

About Article (Content) Sections

We realize that you will not always want to use all the same content areas as we have placed in this template. Modifying the name sof the content sections in the admin area will update them also on the site homepage.

About the Top Stories Section

Although you may certainly use this section any way you choose, it was set up with the idea that you might want to make one of your Sports, News, etc articles to also be a Top Story. The quickest way to do this is to clone your Sports (or other) article and save a copy of it in the Top Stories section (you may need to replace the summary image with one that is optimized for display in the slider). To clone an article, go to your site admin area at 'Content >> View Active Pages' and locate the article you wish to clone. Then, click the clone icon to its right (this is the second of the five icons found to the right of all articles in the admin area). Now just change the section to where this clone will be saved and preview it on your site homepage.

This site template makes use of our Related Articles features for your site's articles. When you create an article, make sure to add some keywords in the Keywords & Phrases for the Article and whenever two articles share a keyword, they will be listed as related. If you wish to turn off this feature, please contact us and we will be happy to assist.