Site Transfer Projects

You may be asked to build the pages and create the navigation for your project. I recommend you do this step first, creating/publishing the pages and adding them to the navigation. The videos below will show you how to create a new page, create a redirect page, and build the navigation menu.

• Creating and Publishing a New Page
• Setting up the Navigation/Subnavigation
• Redirect Pages
• Redirect Page Settings to Enable Option to Open in a New Window

The next step is to go page by page, adding all the content to your pages. It’s very important that you place all text from the live site into a text edisor, such as Notepad, before pasting it into WordPress. If you don’t don’t do this step, the page may look fine to you, but it carries over a large amount of code that we don’t want. If you choose to cut out this step, you will be asked to re-do the entire site. The work you do in transferring over a page is no different from working on a request in the queue. Please follow all the same rules and guidelines including:

Spacing out the Content
As you add the content, be sure to place each new section that begins with a new heading in its own container. This will allow us to add things in between, rearrange the order of the content, and add photos/graphics/videos in the middle as needed in the future.

FAQ Pages
For any FAQ pages, we will use toggles (collapsibles) to add each question/answer to the page.

Graphics-Related Items
When we are transferring over the content of a page, we are only responsible for what we typically handle. We don’t need to do anything that a graphics updater would do for us, and we don’t send it anywhere for the graphics work. They will come in at a later time in the project and take care of their part. All we do is transfer the content, which is anything we would handle on a request coming through the queue. So we transfer all the words, buttons, links, documents, collapsible sections (toggles), etc. Anything you would ask for a graphics updater to help with, we would instead add a note with instructions in red letting them know there’s a photo on the site in the sidebar, for example.

Phone Number Format
Please note that as we transfer these sites, we will be converting our current phone number format at the same time. The new format going forward will be 123-267-0000 – all hyphens, no parenthesis. When you double check the page and your links, be sure to scan for any phone numbers that need to be updated as well.

Add any notes for the graphics updater/UI in red text. These notes are used for any instructions for things you need help with such as

• Graphics/UI – please add in photos and logos to the text section below to match existing page.
• Graphics/UI – insert sidebar photo.

You can add notes for yourself if you have something you need to add to the page but aren’t sure how to do such as:

• CU – need to add in staff listing.
• CU – need to add calendar events to the Events section.

Once you’ve completed the page, double check everything to make sure you’ve transferred all the content, including links. Please cross reference the live site to ensure you’ve included all sections in the main part of the page and the sidebar. Please check for the new phone number format, ensure all links are opening correctly, and all buttons have been created.

Please note that this step will be handled on a case-by-case basis. If the admin assigning you the project did not provide any instructions, be sure to ask how they want you to handle the staff listings.

Below you will find some videos to help you transfer the contacts from the Contact Manager module in SWEngine to the Contact List module in WordPress. I’ve also included a link to an upload template that I’ve created to help you import your contacts at one time instead of having to add them one-by-one.

• Adding and Individual Contact Listing
• Preparing a Contact List .csv File for Upload
• Original Contact List Upload Template (you will want to download this and save to your files)
• Importing Contacts Using the .csv File
• Migrating Biographies

If you’re working on a school and need to add a link to the district website (or vice versa), you will add the same link that you see on the live site with the exception of keeping all letters lowercase.

• Instead of this: https://www.schoolwebmasters.com/Marketing-Your-School
• You will use this:  https://www.schoolwebmasters.com/marketing-your-school

Please note that until all the new sites in the school district are live with the new WordPress site, these links may temporarily go to the existing live SWEngine site. Once the new site is turned on, everything will go to the new site.

If there are any file links on the page, you will need to download the files and save them to your computer. Then you will add the files to the Media section of WordPress.  You can add files all at one time or as you add the content, whichever works best for you. We will keep our current guidelines for naming files. See below:

• Existing files that you download from the live site will already have hyphens in between the words. In the interest of time, we don’t need to rename any files unless they have additional symbols or punctuation, which you want to remove.
• New files for new pages or requests will use title capitalization with spaces between words and no punctuation or symbols
  Example: April 13 2023 Agenda

For headings on the page, we need to follow the same order that we use in SWEngine, so the pages will be ADA compliant.

• H1 – there will only be one of these, and it’s the title of the page in the main section
• H2 – this label is for all sections in the main part of the page beneath the H1
• H3 – there will only be one of these on the page, and it’s the top title of the sidebar
• H4 – this label is for all additional sidebar sections.

For these projects, we need to go by the correct order of the headings. We can’t go by how the headings look because our UI Department doesn’t finish all the styling until after we add the content. They do their work in two phases. In phase I, they build the basics of the site and get it set up. Then later, after we add the content, they go back and update the appearance of the headings, background colors if needed, and lots of other things. When we work on the content, the site will never look complete until all the different departments involved have had their opportunity to do their thing.

With our Helpful Links pages on WordPress sites, we are not going to continue using the graphic images we’ve used in the past. We’ll simply use a list of links instead. Sometimes these pages will be titled Helpful Links, or sometimes they will be titled Web Links.

• State Links for whatever state the school is in – spreadsheet with IDs
• Just For Fun – https://www.helpfullinks.org/helpfullinks/index.cfm?catID=5
• Parent Links – https://www.helpfullinks.org/helpfullinks/index.cfm?catID=2
• Reference Links – https://www.helpfullinks.org/helpfullinks/index.cfm?catID=4
• Safety Tips – https://www.helpfullinks.org/helpfullinks/index.cfm?catID=6
• Student Links – https://www.helpfullinks.org/helpfullinks/index.cfm?catID=1

So your end result will look like this sample page:

• Helpful Links Example Page

Instead of having a menu appear beneath the quick links sections, we are creating full pages so the Parents, Students, Employees or (Staff), and Community tabs will be buttons that link to a full page titled accordingly (Parents, Students, etc.) The pages will be blind pages only linked from the buttons and not included in the navigation of the site. Each resource page will contain an H1 title and a bullet list of links.

• Example: Austin Area School District