Nutrition and Exercise

Your site has been designed and built to serve the goals of your organization while satisfying the needs of your site visitors. To ensure that it continues to perform well you need to take good care of it by feeding it new content on a regular basis. Your site needs regular exercise. If you ignore it, then it will stagnate over time.

Reasons for updating content.

Some of your content can stay the same for months or years. Other content will need to change in keeping with changes at your organization. You may need to edit or add new pages to keep your content useful.

You spent several weeks planning your new site, but as visitors start using it you may discover that some pages are more useful than others. You may find that users expect to find information that isn’t there. If you give your site regular checkups you can get a good sense of what content you need to modify.

Sites with more pages have more content indexed by Google. This makes them easier to find. An easy way to add content is by adding posts to your blog. You can use the blog to post announcements, events, news, media mentions and educational content. Consider using your blog to give your visitors an insiders view into your organization and the niche it serves.

How to update content

Content can be added or updated using either the Classic Editor or the new Block Editor. The Classic editor has an interface similar to Microsoft Word and other editing programs. The Block editor allows you to choose blocks to add different types of content such as paragraphs, images and videos. We will demonstrate the editors in today’s talk, but you may also find it useful to review the tutorials below.

Images and Copyright

Generally you should use your own images whenever possible. If not there are many free sources available or you can buy stock photos. I like to use Google image search then filter it for images that are allowed for use under creative commons or other means. Wikipedia and U.S. government sites often have images you may use. Sites like Pixabay are also good places to look. Many of the photos on this site came from there. On Flickr you can search for photos licensed for use under Creative Commons. If you find a photo somewhere and it does not clearly state that you can use it, then assume it is protected under copyright. Do not use it without getting permission from the owner.

Video Embeds

If you paste a YouTube or Vimeo link in your page it will work. YouTube also provides you with an embed code you can use that includes dimensions. Alas these aren’t always the dimensions you want. You can edit those as needed. How to Change A YouTube Video Embed Code Size has a list of common dimensions you can use.