Setting Up An OM4 Website

This article runs through how to create an OM4 website and set it up for the first time.

Are you a Graphic Designer, Copywriter, or Online Marketer who would like to be able to establish your own websites on the OM4 platform? You can create new websites, create content using the WordPress dashboard, and use the OM4 Site Design options to apply your own design. Then you can map the site to a standard domain, complete with email services. No more relying on a web developer to deliver your services. We benefit because when your new websites go live we get paid our standard hosting fee. You benefit because you can focus on your high value services and leave us to worry about all the technical matters.

An account with OM4 is required – there is no fee to register or maintain an account with us. If you are a bona fide Graphic Designer, Copywriter or Online Marketer, use our Contact Form to get in touch.

For OM4 partners we have fixed price services that will do many of these tasks for you. We want you to have a choice – learn all about it and do it yourself, or just get it done for you.

Create the Website	Using your account login, go to Dashboard, Domains, New Website and create a new website. This will create a subdomain site such as yoursite.om4tourism.com or yoursite.om4business.com. Register your domain and set the nameservers to OM4, then use Dashboard, Domains, Domain Setup to map your subdomain site to your domain. You can do this immediately, or update your content and design first before you ‘go live’.
Login	To modify your web site, go to your new web site and login to your dashboard (use the login details we provide you with when you register). Your Login link is in the footer of your website.
User Profile	Under Users, Authors and Users find your user profile and click the Edit button. Update your First Name, Last Name and click Update User. Then update your Display name (that appears at the top of posts), and also your web page and email address, and press Update User again.
Site Name and Tagline	Use Dashboard, Settings, General to update the Name and Tagline for your site. The Name and Tagline are displayed over the top of your header by default. Use Dashboard, Design, Site Design to set the postion, font, size and colour of the Header Title (the Name) and Header Tagline, or choose to not display them over your header at all.
Setting Your Front Page	Depending on your startup package, we will have created a number of web pages for you. Yo can set any page to display as your front page, or you can chose to display your latest blog posts on your front page instead. Use Dashboard, Settings, Reading to choose whether to show a static page (and you can choose any page in your website) or your latest posts as your front page.
Contact Email Address	Your primary email address for your website is setup from Dashboard, Settings, General. Use Dashboard, Settings, Contact Form ][ to check or update the email address used for Contact Forms on your website. If you cannot see this option, go to Dashboard, Plugins and scroll down to Contact Form ][. Click Activate. Some sites use the more advanced CformsII - you will see the Cforms menu alongside Write Manage Design Comments if it is active. To check the email address used when Cforms are being used, go to CformsII menu. On the very first page for Cforms, you will see one or more contact forms, each with a number. Scroll down the page to the Core Form Admin / Email Options and open the section by pressing the red plus symbol. You can check the email address here. This email address is copied from your General Settings page, so if that is correct, these should already be Ok as well.
Changing the Layout of your Site	You can manage all aspects of the site design using Dashboard, Appearance, Site Design. The settings have notes that explain how they work, and there is a Tips and Techniques section at the end of the page that gives more detail. Here are simplified instructions that describe how to change just the Header Image: Changing the Header Image for your OM4 Web Site We also have more detailed instructions for Graphic Designers who want to create a complete design in Photshop and then slice and apply the design to the site: Changing the Site Design for an OM4 Website
Search Engine Optimization	Step 1: Optimize your Home Page Optimizing your Home page will give you the most benefit for the smallest effort. Go to Dashboard, Settings, All in One SEO. Update the following fields: Home Title – Create a title for your site Home Page that includes your most important keyword. This is the title that will be indexed for your Home Page. Include your keyword(s) in a natural way that makes sense for people. Home Description – Create a description for your Home Page. This is the longer description that will be displayed for your site on search engine result pages. A good description encourages visitors to click through to your site from the search results. Home Keywords – these are not relevant for search engines these days, we recommend you leave them blank. Step 2: Optimize other web pages Once you have All in One SEO active, every page and post will automatically get a unique Page Title (taken from the Page/Post title) and Page Description (taken from the early part of the page/post text). So most of your work is done. However, if your page/post titles don’t include the keywords you want to optimize for, go to the Edit Page or Edit Post screen and use the All in One SEO fields (below the Edit box) to set your own Title and Description. Step 3: Write great content and earn links Write great web pages and blog posts that describe problems your customers face and how to solve them. Talk about subjects that interest your clients. Get in touch with other websites who – once they know about your great content – can’t help but link to your brilliant material. Easy to say, hard to do. These are the hard yards of search engine optimization. Step 4: Following Steps 1, 2 and 3 above will mean your site is effective with search engines. But if you want to learn more we have detailed articles in our How To section that will help you understand search engine optimization in more detail.
Robots.txt	Use a robots.txt file if you want to exclude some pages from being indexed by search engines Use Dashboard, Settings, KB Robots.txt to update the instructions your site provides to search engine robots. For example, if you wanted to stop the Login page and the /admin page (and all of its sub pages) from being indexed you would have the following entries: `User-agent: * Disallow: /admin Disallow: /wp-login.php`
Favicon	Set your site favicon A favicon is a small graphic displayed next to your site URL in a browser’s URL bar. Create a favicon first, perhaps using this free online Favicon generator, and take note of the location of the favicon file you save to your hard disk. Use Dashboard, Plugins to activate the Favicon Manager plugin. Use Dashboard, Settings, Favicons to upload your Favicon from your hard disk.
Bad Behavior Message	Turn off the Bad Behavior Message Bad Behavior is a plugin used to help block bots attempting to lodge comment spam on your blog. By default a message is displayed below the footer of your website showing the number of blocked attempts. You can turn off this message using Dashboard, Settings, Bad Behavior.
Google XML Sitemap	Help your site get indexed by search engines Google XML Sitemaps is a plugin used to help search engines discover all pages and posts on your website. Once activated, Google, Yahoo and Live Search all get sent a list of all of your pages and posts, which should help your site get indexed quicker. Activate the plugin Ensure the plugin is activated by going to Dashboard -> Plugins and activating the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. Generate your first sitemap Go to Dashboard -> Settings -> XML Sitemaps, and generate your first XML sitemap. Once your first XML sitemap has been generated, it will automatically be updated when you publish new pages or posts.
Email	When you map your subdomain to a domain, the DNS for the domain is automatically configured ready to setup Google Apps for email on the domain. If you need to you can use Dashboard, Domains, Email Setup to change the DNS mail settings to custom MX settings.
Domain Redirects	You can use Dashboard, Domains, Domain Redirection to redirect another domain to your primary domain (for example, to redirect yourdomain.net to yourdomain.com).
Page Redirects	If you want to be able to redirect a specific page within your website to a new page, use Dashboard, Plugins to activate the Redirection plugin. Then use Dashboard, Domains, Page Redirection to redirect one page to another. This is useful if you are refreshing an old website by moving it on to the OM4 platform, as it allows you to redirect old pages that are currently indexed to the new page (for example, yourdomain.com/oldpage.html to yourdomain.com/newpage/).