LabInspire Demo Site Setup Instructions

How To

Homepage Overview

The homepage consists of a featured area, mini-features area, home sidebar and a widgetized footer.

Homepage layout

Setup Featured Area

The featured area will fade between all the pages that you have added in the “Featured Pages” text box in the Home – Featured tab in the Options Panel. The featured area can hold one or more pages. If you only add one one page it will not show navigation arrows/buttons below as they are not used with only one page.

Preparing a page for featured area

To add a page simply follow these steps:

1. Go to Write > Page.
2. Type a title for the page and complete all of the post’s body content.
3. Add an image in the Custom Settings panel if you want to display an image on the right of the page.
4. Publish the page.

Adding a page to featured area

Find the page ID & Add it to the options panel

Once you’ve created your pages, you then need to assign these pages to the feature area in the options:

1. Click on Manage > Pages and find the Page ID.
2. Go to Options Panel and add the page ID to the Home – Featured > Featured Pages text box. Multiple page ID’s should be separated with a comma.
3. When you preview your page now, you’ll see the page you added, along with the image in the featured scroller. Once you have added multiple pages, you’ll be able to navigate.

Adding the featured page ID’s in the options panel

Add buttons to featured page

To add a button to a page in the featured area, you need to add some html code by using the HTML tab. Simply add a link with the class btn and wrap the text in a span:

			<a href="#" class="btn"><span>Button text</span></a>

Add video to featured page

Adding video is just as simple as adding an image to the page. Simply use the Embed field in the Custom Settings panel, and add your embed code.

Adding video embed code

Setup Mini-Features Area

The main area consists of a left column that can hold mini-features, and a right column that holds the home widgetized sidebar. The left main column can also hold page content above or below the mini-features area.

Add Mini-features Block

In this area you can add as many mini-feature blocks as you wish (our demo has 4). To setup a mini-feature block you need to create pages in WordPress and link those pages in the options panel.

1. Add a new Page in WordPress (Page -> Add New)
2. Add a title to the page e.g. “Watch your site grow”
3. Add some text in the content
4. Upload an icon via the Custom Settings block)
5. Add an URL if you want a Read More link below your block
6. Publish the page and add the page ID to the options panel.

Setup a mini-features block by adding content to marked fields

Add the page ID’s for your mini-featured pages in the options panel

You can also add content above or below the Mini-features area, by following steps 1-3 and 6 above.

Setup Blog

To add a Blog to the main navigation, simply follow these steps:

1. Add a new Page in WordPress (Page -> Add New)
2. Add a title to the page e.g. “Blog”
3. Select the Blog page template in the Attributes panel on the right
4. Publish your page!

Add blog page template

If you are unsure on how to setup a page template, have a look at our instructional video in our Page Template section.

Setup the Portfolio

This theme includes a portfolio template which can showcase your work or products. To add the portfolio you need to follow these steps:

Add the Portfolio link to navigation

1. Add a new Page in WordPress (Page -> Add New)
2. Add a title to the page e.g. “Portfolio”
3. Select the Portfolio page template in the Attributes panel on the right
4. Publish your page!

Setup a portfolio page template

Add portfolio category and posts

1. Add a new category that will hold your posts (Posts -> Categories) e.g. “Portfolio”
2. Add a new Post in WordPress (Posts -> Add New)
3. Add a title to the post
4. Add the post to the category you created in step #1
5. Add a tag to the post if you wish to categorize your portfolio (e.g. “Web” or “Print”)
6. Add some text in the content to describe the portfolio item
7. Upload the Portfolio Thumbnail (450×210px) image in the Custom Settings area
8. Add an URL to an external image or upload a large image which your thumbnail will link to
9. Publish the page and repeat for next portfolio item

Add a portfolio post

Add portfolio thumbnail and large image to post

Setup options

1. Go to the theme Options Panel
2. Find the Portfolio section
3. Select the category you created above
4. Choose if you want to show large image in a lightbox
5. If you added any tags to your posts, then add these tags to “Portfolio Tags” field (e.g. “web, print”)
6. Save settings and you’re done!

Widgets

Custom Optimize widgets

The theme includes 8 custom widgets that you can add to any one of your widgetized areas:

• Woo – Flickr
• Woo – Ads Widget
• Woo – Search
• Woo – News
• Woo – Tabs
• Woo – Feedback
• Woo – Blog Author Info
• Woo – Twitter Stream

Setting up widgets in a WooTheme

Widgets are hugely powerful optional modular blocks of content or functionality that you can place on your WooThemes powered, WordPress website. This tutorial shows you how to set up widgets to further enhance your website’s appearance.

Page Templates

Custom Page Templates

This theme comes bundled with unique page templates for some additional functionality to your WooThemes powered website. Below is a list of some of the page templates available across our themes. Please note they are not all bundled with all our themes.

• Archives (template-archives.php) - Displays all categories, monthly archives, popular tags and the 30 latest posts
• Sitemap (template-sitemap.php) - An alternative to some WordPress plugins out there, this page template will create a sitemap, which you can use for SEO & user-usability purposes.
• Full Width (template-fullwidth.php) – A full width page template without the sidebar.
• Redirect (template-redirect.php) – Is a nifty page template used to “fool” WordPress into creating a menu item in your page navigation, which is in fact a link to an external site. Simply follow the steps mentioned below under “Adding an external url to your page navigation menu”
• Image Gallery (template-imagegallery.php) * - Displays the images you have associated with your posts in an image gallery, linking back to the original article
• Contact Form (template-contact.php)* – A page with a contact form on it so that a web visitor can email you. Please note you will have to add your email address to the theme option’s panel of the theme to make sure it is set up correctly.

* This page template isn’t included in all themes

Setting Up Page Templates

If you still need some guidance after this video tutorial then follow the steps below:

1. Go to Write > Page in the WP admin panel.
2. Simply fill in the page title, which can be anything, and then ignore the page body content.
3. Scroll down to the “Templates” field in the “Attributes” box and select the page template you’d like to use.
4. And publish!

Adding an external url to your page navigation menu

1. Create a new page in WordPress
2. Add a title to the page (e.g. WooThemes)
3. Add an URL to the content of the page (e.g. http://www.woothemes.com OR woothemes.com OR www.woothemes.com)
4. Add the “Redirect” page template to the page (using the method described in the video tutorial above)
5. Publish! Your menu item will now be in your page navigation and link to an external site.

SEO

Getting started

WooSEO (SEO standing for Search Engine Optimization) will give you an immediate edge over your competition. This out of the box functionality will have your site optimized for Google, and other search engine results with a few clicks, helping you climb the rankings for keywords you want to be registered under.

SEO is by no means an easy skill to master, but getting the basics right is a great start to getting healthy traffic to your website.

Using 3rd party data

When using the Woothemes SEO functionality most users will prefer to disable any other 3rd party SEO plugins that they might have been using beforehand. In an effort to salvage any data previously added to posts with these plugins, this setting will enable WooSEO to use that data and make switching over easy and effortless.

Please note that the only supported plugins at this stage are the “All-in-One SEO” and “Headspace 2” plugins. All data is extracted from post custom fields and does not take preference over data added to WooSEO custom fields.

Page Titles

What are page titles?

This section controls the Page titles () of your theme.

Separator – This is what will appear between selected parts of your title segments.

Blog title & Blog Description – Also found in the Theme settings pages, you can quickly update your blogs main title and it’s description for use all over you site.

Use woo_title() – Recommended. Give yourself more control with the woo_title function. Enable this option to uncover a range of new options to modify your page titles.

Disable Custom Titles – This option voids any previously added custom page titles, and only uses the woo_title() basic output, ensuring that your page titles are uniform and predictable across your site.

Paged Variable – When browsing your site, this variable will appear when you page throughout your archives. Classically this comes into play when viewing older posts on a page and you get “Page 2″ of the browsing results. This variable lets you customize the word that gets used in the Pagination process.

Paged Variable Position – Choose to have the paging variable to appear before, or after the generated page title.

Homepage, Single, Page & Archive Title Layout – Select from the options available how you want to have your page title’s formatted when displaying on various templates and archives.

Meta

What is meta?

Meta information on your site helps search engines crawl and index your site. It also helps with adding value to your pages, resulting in better rankings in search engines. Typical meta tags for example, gets added to the head of your site serving many kinds of purposes.

Indexing Meta

Archive Indexing – Any WordPress site can have several archives to find/categorize posts. Be it by category, date, tags, search, etc. and all get indexed by search engines. This can create issues as search engines are forced to index pages containing the same data, thus diluting the overall value of keywords.

By default we have set the Archive indexing to the “category archives” so to focus in on more valuable sections of your site, in the words telling search engines only to index the selected archives.

Making Robots Follow

By default single.php and page.php pages do not let search engines follow any outbound links from the these, “Singular” types of pages, thus letting them focus in on your content, and not somebody else’s. If you did want search engines to follow links from singular pages, this option will let you do that.

Description Meta

Homepage Description

Off – Have no meta description for your homepage.

From WP Site Description – Add your site’s description (also used in page titles) to the homepage description

From Custom Homepage Description – Add a description (text area found below) to your site’s homepage meta description.

Single Post/Page Description

Off – Have no meta description for your post/page.

From Custom Field and/or Plugins – Add custom descriptions to posts and pages from the fields given in the edit backend. This option will also extract data from posts added via plugins.

When a post has been created previously with data from 3rd party plugins, this option will extract the data and use it when available.

Automatically from Post/Page Content – Choose to generate descriptions from the content already available on in the post or page. It will use content from the first segment of your content.

Keyword Meta

Homepage Keywords

Off – Have no meta keywords on your homepage.

From custom Homepage Keywords – This will add keywords (from the texture below) into you homepage keywords meta.

Single Post/Page Keywords

Off – Have no keywords on Posts or Pages.

From Custom Field and/or Plugins – Add custom descriptions to posts and pages from the fields given in the edit backend. This option will also extract data from post added via plugins.

When a post has been created previously with data from 3rd party plugins, this option will extract the data and use it when available.

Automatically from Post Tags & Categories – Generate keywords automatically from the current posts Tags and Categories. (Posts Only)

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