ePortfolios Set Up

Begin by going to eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu, and logging in.

Once you’ve logged in, go to the upper left hand corner and select “My Sites.”

Select “Add New,” then name your site. You might want to choose something easy to identify but generic: I recommend your last name and graduation year. Name your site: you can change later. For privacy, select “No.” For template, go with All-Purpose.

This will now create a template site, with some very basic features. Go to your new site.

Once here, go to the Dashboard. Access the Dashboard by hovering over your site name in the upper left and then selecting “Dashboard” from the drop-down.

This is the “back end” of your site, where you as an administrator have all the control. You can do A LOT in the dashboard, and I encourage you to explore and play around. Here are the basics:

Posts

Allows you to create new Posts, which are basically like blog posts that will go on your page. Each post can be viewable as its own link, or you can have lots of posts collect on a single page, either the home page or another designated place.

You can also manage and edit previous posts from here, as well as manage and edit categories and tags.

Categories are a way to not only organize your posts by topic/style/whatever, they are also a way to organize your site using menus (more on this later).

Tags are like hashtags – they provide metadata that your readers can click on to find posts using keywords that you designate.

Media

Allows you to manage photos, audio, video, and other files that you upload to your site.

Links

If you want to have a section of links on your page, perhaps in a sidebar, header, footer, or menu item, you can do that here.

Pages

Pages are a single place that differ from posts in that they are a more stable, permanent location. Use Pages for information that you want to collect and link to from other places on your site.

Appearance

Allows you to customize the look and style of your site. Choose a theme (there are many different themes and you can change them any time) and play around with different ones until you find one that suits your needs and personal style.

“Customize” allows you to play around with the appearance and see the results change live before saving them.

“Static Front Page” allows you to designate whether your home page will display a home page that remains constant (which you can edit), or whether you want the most recent posts to appear on your home page (more like a blog). See below under “Settings.”

Menus and Widgets (under Appearance)

Menus and widgets are two of the ways to really make your site user-friendly and easy to navigate, especially if you create a lot of content.

Menus will appear in whichever place your theme supports for menus. Here you can add content to the menu, including specific Pages, Posts, Categories, or Links. You can also nest certain items under others to create drop-down menus.

Create a menu, give it a name like “Default” or “Primary.” As your site’s usage changes, you can change which menu you use.

Select items that you want to add to the menu

When you’re done, click “Save Menu.” Now go to the “front side” of your page (open it in a new tab), and see what the menu looks like. Drag one item under another and indent it to create a sub item, which will drop down. Change the order of your menu items.

Widgets are a way to customize your sidebar and footer areas. Each theme has a different number of widget areas: the default theme in this post only has a single sidebar widget area. Select widgets, and then add certain ones to your sidebar area.

Under each widget, you can change how the name will display, and also how it will act based on the widget. For example, if I select “Categories” widget, it will display all my Categories in the sidebar at the top. I can change it so that this section is titled “Topics,” and can choose to make it a drop-down menu with post counts next to each Category. Remember to make changes using the green “Save” button!

It will look like this:

Plugins

Macaulay has over 170 different WordPress plugins that you can use for your site!! Think of these like apps or added features: some are made by WordPress, but many are programmed by third parties who want a specific kind of functionality. Explore these and see if any are right for you! To use them, “Activate” a plugin, and then google the plugin to find information on how the plugin works. Some plugins will create widgets for you to use, others will just have an overall effect on your entire page, and some will only affect the Dashboard functionality. Plugins allow you to further accessorize and customize your page.

• One plugin to definitely try is the Google Doc Embedder, which allows you to add PDFs and other files directly into your site rather than providing links.

Settings

• In “General” you can change the name, tagline, date/time format, and other basic info.
• “Reading” will allow you to decide whether you want to make your site have a static front page (always remains the same although you can choose to edit it) or whether you want a blog page. If you choose to have a static front page, you should also select a Posts page. To do this, create a new page and call it whatever you like (“Posts,” “Blog”). Then assign that page as the “Posts page” in Reading Settings. You can then place a link to that page in your menu, into a widget, onto your home page, or all three!
  • Here you can also select your site visibility, which is basically your privacy.

Some good things to know:

When adding a new post/page:

The box in the upper right has a variety of features. You can save a draft, which is important because if you accidentally navigate away from your page, you could lose your work! (WordPress doesn’t necessarily autosave). You can also “Preview” what your post will look like.

Under “Visibility,” you can make a post “Sticky” which means it will automatically display at the top of your home/posts page.

You can also schedule a post to publish at a later time. Maybe you’ve been working on it at 3am but you don’t want people to see that…

Adding a photo/video

To add an image, click “Add Media” which brings a file search window. You can either choose a file or drag and drop. Once you’ve selected the file, you can add a caption, change the display text when you hover over the image with your cursor, and change the size. You also get a unique URL for the image.

To add a YouTube or Vimeo video, just type the URL of the video into the text editor!

If you type:

https://youtu.be/bzE-IMaegzQ

Your post will display:

If you have questions, things aren’t working, or you’d like more help, you can either email Jake or google your question — there are lots of people who use WordPress and have provided answers on the internet already.