OM4 Theme Enhancements April 2008

We have created a new sidebar widget that lets you:

• put together a set of feature articles, with a short snippet and link for each
• display a randomly selected article from the set each time a visitor loads a page

To see it in action, have a look at the Stories of Eye Loss in the sidebar of Paul and Jenny’s website.

How to use:

1. Login to your Dashboard, go to Plugins and activate the Feature Articles plugin
2. Go to Manage, Feature Articles and create article snippets and links. Give them a common category to create groups of articles.
3. Go to Design, Site Design and drag the widget into your sidebar. Enter the category of articles you want displayed.

Your feature articles can come from your website, or from another. You can include images in your article snippets, just make sure they aren’t wider than your sidebar.

This plugin was developed by James and derived from Jodi Diehl’s excellent WP-Testimonials plugin.

You can create a:

• Splash Page – a page with just the header, menus and footer. No sidebars, no margins, so you can create whatever content your want in the page area.
• Raw Splash Page – this is essentially a blank page. No headers, menus, sidebars or footer. Text and images are centered horizontally, although you can override this.

We have always provided the Article page template. That page template displays your web page without any sidebars, which is good if you want to avoid any distractions.

We’ve now made it easier to manage these:

• Go to Design, Site Design and set Page Comments on or off for your whole website
• Go to Manage, Pages and use the Discussion settings to set comments on or off for individual pages

Dynamic Rollover Menus show top level pages in your menu bar, and when a visitor rolls their mouse over the menu, all the sub pages belonging to that page are displayed as a pop down menu.

The styling of these menus may require some patience to get the colour of text and backgrounds the way you like. We hope to simplify this in future releases. For now, recognise you can use the Site Design page to set colours for the menus and backgrounds of both the top level menus and the rolldown menus. A lot of flexibility. But you may need to employ some trial and error to get it right.

You can mark contacts as converting to a sale or not. And if you do that, you can report on your conversion rate.

To review contacts, login to your site and go to Dashboard, Contacts (it is a sub menu from the main Dashboard).

You can set Transparent as a background colour.

There are more styling options for headings – you can set the size, colour and line spacing for Headings (level 2, 3 and 4).

There are also more hints and tips in the Site Design page, so you can explore what the settings do.