A Guide To Using Your Website

Welcome to WordPress! You’ll find you can edit most aspects of your website yourself, once you get familiar it is quick and easy.

This is your website Guide page. We’ve created it as a helpful resource when getting to know how your website works.

We aim to update this page whenever we help you make changes. This is an editable page like any other, so please make it yours and use it to record any operational changes you notice too.

As well as WordPress your website uses a page builder and many plugins that give extra functionality WordPress alone can’t offer.  Plugins evolve over time and so it is possible that over time some instructions on this page may become outdated.

Have any concerns or questions? Please be in touch using service@om4.com.au. We will be pleased to help. 

If you want to jump right in, here are your quick start essentials

  1. Staging Site: learn how to create your Staging Site – this is a copy of your website allowing you to practice changes without affecting anything on your live site.
  2. Page Builder Intro: watch the introductory video about how to use the Elementor.
  3. Key Info Guide: we’ve put together a key information guide below –  to let you know how to change the words and photos on your website yourself.
Accordion Content

Take 5 minutes to check things out

Take 5 minutes to regularly review your website operations to reduce the risk of errors affecting your business.

What are the critical processes on your website that could impact your customers and your income?

Are you anticipating stock outages? Is your payment gateway working and are shop payments completing successfully? If you have booking systems or enquiry forms, are you receiving all of your customer requests?

What regular testing schedule (monthly, weekly, daily) is best for your business?

Know the important ways customers interact with you through your website and test those pathways. Set regular diary entries for testing and assign the tasks to a team member to complete.

Are there unlikely or irregular events you might need to prepare for?

Do you have important though irregular events that are essential to your business? Are there seasonal peak ordering periods or do you send occasional news blasts with special offers? Anticipate the impact of these events and be ready for sudden increases in website activity.

Critical Take 5 Checklist

Step 1: Is the website up to date? (dashboard check)

Step 2: Does the website present correctly? (visual check)

Step 3: Can the website process enquiry forms and notify you? (form check)

Step 4: Can the website process online payments and notify you? (payment check)

Step 5: Are your signups and social links correct? (newsletter subscriber and social media check)

Your website uses many premium paid plugins. In some cases licensing costs are covered by OM4’s Developer Licensing as part of your monthly Web Essentials fee. At other times you may be paying for licensing directly yourself.

The links below give you more information about specific premium plugins, how they are paid for and how to seek help when using them.

Squash Spam: Akismet premium spam filtering for forms and comments.

Page Optimisation Performance: Yoast SEO

Advanced Forms: Gravity Forms for premium editable forms.

Friendly Dashboard: Admin Columns Pro for configurable dashboards.

Powerful Information Filtering: Toolset plugin allows for custom site databases and filtering.

WooCommerce Premium Shipping Extension: Table Rate Shipping.

Beautiful email marketing: Campaign Monitor

Flexible email and commerce marketing: MailChimp

Booking & Scheduling: Bookeo

Conversion Optimisation: Optin Monster

Ecommerce Marketing Automation: CM Commerce

To update the main areas of content on your website:

  • Pages: using your website menu browse to the page you want to edit. Use the Page Builder item in the top menu to edit the page. Hover over each element on the page and click the spanner icon of each module to edit.
  • Blog: add/edit blog posts and blog categories using Dashboard, Posts. Make sure to set a Featured Image
  • Menus: add new items and reorder using Dashboard, Appearance, Menus
  • Forms: edit forms using Dashboard, Forms. Click an existing form to edit.

Staging

From your WordPress dashboard, use the WPEngine User Portal to copy your current production website across to your staging site. Get the link and login into it using your normal user id. You can make changes in Staging without affecting production. It can be useful as a practice ground.

WordPress, Plugin & Theme Updates

Your website requires regular updates for WordPress, plugins and themes.

While WP Engine is your website host, you received automatic updating for WordPress. You or someone you authorise will need to update your website plugins and themes. OM4 recommends monthly updates. 

  • Updates: Keep your website up to date – visit Dashboard, Updates regularly and make sure you are running the latest versions of WordPress, plugins and your theme.
  • Staging Site: You can create a Staging site (a separate copy of your Live website) so you can try out new plugins or test updates before they are run on your Live site.
  • Backup Points: Create a backup point before running updates using Dashboard, WP Engine, User Portal (or just login to my.wpengine.com) and create a manual backup point. You can Restore to this backup point if needed.
  • Test After Updates: After making changes such as updating WordPress, plugins or your theme, you should check your site still operates normally, particularly for your important website functions such as enquiry forms, online sales or service/product pages.

The process of updating theme and plugins is described in full in this article Updating Themes and Plugins, step by step in the Staging Environment.

If you are updating the WooCommerce plugin, it is suggested that you first update all other plugins, then update WooCommerce last.

It is recommended you regularly, and definitely after upgrading your website, purchase a product from your website. Make a full payment so you can see the payment gateway working correctly, and all email notifications work correctly. You can use the test coupon code to reduce the payment amount by 99%.

How to article and video

Does your website use forms (like a Contact form)?

If you do, we recommend a regular testing schedule to ensure your forms continue working as expected. It is also sensible to test before any one off promotions or events that could bring extra customer activity to your website.

Your website uses the Gravity Forms plugin. Gravity forms allows you to have a confirmation message appear after a web visitor completes a form, and it allows email notifications about the form submission to be sent to one or more of your own email addresses. Some websites are set up to send a confirmation email to the web visitor too.

How to test a form

  • Log out of your website and complete at least one form on your website as if you are a customer or visitor.
  • Notice the confirmation page or message that appears.
  • Login and check that the website has registered the email in the Email Log, and in the Gravity Forms entries for that form.
  • Notice the email addresses that received notification of the message.

Is everything operating as expected? If you have any concerns or questions please contact service@om4.com.au

Check your website Email Log

  • Login to Dashboard, Email Log
  • Check that your test email has been logged by the website

The function of this log is to record each email sent to or from you website.

Check the Gravity Form Entries screen

  • Login to Dashboard, Forms
  • Hover over the name of the form you tested and click on Entries in the submenu that appears
  • Check that your test email has been logged by the website

Do you offer a subscription form to join a news mailing list?

You will be using Campaign Monitor or MailChimp to create your newsletter. The subscription form may come from your newsletter provider, or from Gravity Forms.

Either way, testing is similar.

How to test a form

  • Log out of your website and complete the newsletter subscriptions form as if you are a customer or visitor.
  • Notice the confirmation page or message that appears.
  • Notice the email addresses that received notification of the message (if applicable)
  • Login to your newsletter provider and check that your test subscription has appeared in the correct subscriber list.

Is everything operating as expected? If you have any concerns or questions please contact service@om4.com.au

Prepare the following types of images to the required sizes before uploading to your website:

WordPress Image Editor: Crop or resize images after uploading using Dashboard, Media Library and clicking the Edit Image link. There are videos showing how to use this editor under Dashboard, Manual, Videos.

Advanced Image Editor: Edit images before uploading using the Canva image editor.

Learn more about image optimisation: How Image Optimisation affects your website

Your website uses the WordPress CMS with a front-end Page Builder called Elementor .

To learn more about your Page Builder:

Saved Templates  and Global Widget

These are the Saved Templates and Global Widget’s available to reuse on your site.

All Templates

Sub Page Title Section – Below Header

Contact Us Section

Services Sub Head Graphic

Notice some Templates and/or Widgets are global. A global Template/Widget also appears as a gold colour when hovered over in Page Builder. Edits to a global Templates/Widgets on one page will automatically appear anywhere the Template/Widget appears on the website. All other sections/widgets are a blue colour and are standard. Edit a standard sections/widgets and the change appears only on the page on which you’re working.

Please Note: Do not delete saved Templates and Widgets

Analytics

If you have elected to have Google Analytics and Google Search Console configured for your website, you can review the details as follows:

 

 

How To Videos

Website Style Guide

Here is a visual guide to the typography, button and form styling of the website. These can be edited in the Elementor Global Settings menu.

Primary Heading

Secondary Heading

Accent

Body Copy example. We are a Perth web design agency who specialise in digital marketing and design. We work across many industries with a special focus on wineries, tourism and consultancies.
Our core business is building websites, many with eCommerce stores. We know search really well, and do strategy, SEO / Google Ads and conversion optimisation.

We are also creative, and work with clients on social media, copywriting and graphic design.

A mud map of how to get to My Way's Rockingham branch