This page is for people we have created websites for who are looking to edit or update their own website.
Is this for you?
Before we get started, we should mention that this may not be for you! No matter how good the tools or how good of instruction we provide, some people just will not have the time or inclination to learn and figure these things out. After all, we can’t all be ‘techies’!
If that’s you, remember, you can always simply email us changes you want made periodically and we will do the work for you hourly. At the time of creating this page, our hourly rate is $69. For many people, that’s going to be the better option. We can do a lot of changes inside of a couple hours and many people only update their website every six months or so.
The basics of WordPress
Okay, assuming we just didn’t scare you off let’s get started 🙂
WordPress is what they call a Content Management System or CMS for short… A fancy word for a place website owners can go to edit their website. WordPress is both very user-friendly, but also complicated at times. Think of it as having a range of tools both for people who have no idea what they’re doing, and tools for the web developer that built the website. For the purposes of this quick tutorial, we are giving you the absolute basics of how to edit the existing content on your website.
We will also give you links to some step-by-step video tutorials on various tasks within WordPress and Visual Composer. These should help anybody who gets stuck or wishes to go much deeper in their learning.
Logging in.
Contact us for your login credentials. Once you’re logged in you will be taken to your WordPress dashboard.
The WordPress dashboard.
Once you’re logged in you are taken to your WordPress dashboard. As you can see there’s all kinds of links running down the left hand side of the page to different sections within WordPress such as your ‘Pages’ or ‘Forms’. You are quite welcome to click different links and take a look around. But be very careful!!! Many of these tools and settings are a bit more advanced and if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s probably best to leave it alone 🙂
As I had mentioned, this page will be all about just letting you edit the existing pages on your website and frankly you don’t need to know much of anything about your dashboard in order to do that.
If you want to go much deeper in WordPress or get stuck on something, we suggest this video series. You could learn how to do things such as creating new pages, adding new items to your menu, and a whole host of other things.
Editing your website.
So, getting to the point of this page, let’s look at how to edit the existing pages on your website.
Once you are logged into WordPress, navigate to your sites homepage. You will see there is a WordPress admin bar at the top of the screen. It’s black and has links to back to your dashboard and other tools for that specific page.
To get started editing your page, click ‘Edit with Visual Composer’.
Visual Composer.
First off, an explanation on Visual Composer. Visual Composer is an add-on (they call it a plug-in) for WordPress that gives you additional functionality. Specifically, it allows you to do fancy layouts on your pages such as multiple columns, cool animation effects (slide outs, fade ins, etc) and a host of other things.
So, once you have clicked on ‘Edit with Visual Composer’, the page reloads with options to edit the various sections of the page. Now, as you move your mouse around the screen you will find there are various elements of the page which you can edit. There are rows. Then within the row there might be columns. And then within those columns and rows there will be various elements such as a heading, or a block of text, or an image, or video, or whatever!
To simply edit the page rather than actually changing the whole layout, you want to edit the elements. They’re easy to find, because the edit tool for elements is inside of a green bar.
Editing elements.
Find the element you want to edit. Then, click on the little green pencil icon. That brings up a window where you can then edit what is inside the element. If it’s a text element, it will be very easy to simply edit the text that was there. When you’re done, click the ‘Save changes’ button.
Don’t forget to publish!
When you click the save changes button, you were simply saving the changes to that element. To actually update the whole page, you need to click the blue ‘Update’ button in the top right-hand corner. Once you’ve done that, you have successfully updated your page 🙂 Clicking the ‘X’ to the right of the ‘Update’ button will take you out of Visual Composer and back to the page.
Learning more about Visual Composer.
Different elements behave differently. For instance, editing a heading is different than editing a text block is different than editing an image and so on. That being said, for the most part they are all pretty intuitive. That’s not to say some people won’t get stuck… Everybody has a different skill-set, and a different level of ‘tech savy’ in their background 🙂 There’s nothing to be ashamed of if you find this all a little overwhelming and you simply wish to have us update your website for you periodically. Again, most people just email us every few months with a list of changes and we do the work hourly.
If you wanted to go deeper with Visual Composer or get stuck on something we suggest going through their video tutorials.