Hello world!
Hello! Congratulations on being named an editor of Carrotmob. You are being entrusted to represent Carrotmob publicly, so please always remember to act in the spirit of Carrotmob:
- positivity…carrots, not sticks…
- understand both the business and the consumer in order to have a successful event
- transparency is key. no shady backroom wheeling and dealing
And so on and so forth. You get it. Here are a few steps that you should take to warm up and get familiar with how your new website works. You have a blog, built on technology called “Wordpress“. If you haven’t heard of wordpress before, it’s a powerful platform for creating a blog and more. You may wish to write blog posts, and they will show up on this site in chronological order, like a normal blog. But in addition to blog posts, you can also create “pages”. For example, you could create an “About” page where you describe the goals you have in mind for your Carrotmob campaign, or a “Videos” page, where you can embed a bunch of YouTube videos. The other thing you can do to customize your site is browse through available “widgets”. Whichever widgets you want to add to your site will appear in the right hand sidebar. For example, the widget “Pages” will display to all the other pages you create (like “about”, etc). You can show a calendar of your posts, soon photo galleries, and we will be adding other widgets in the future. If you have some HTML code you’d like to put in, there’s a widget called “Text”. You can put anything you want in there. So here are some next steps for you to follow….
1. Open a new browser window and login at http://[YOUR-TOWN-HERE].carrotmob.org/wp-login.php
You will always log in at that same URL in the future, so bookmark it.
2. Once you’re logged in, you’ll see a dashboard with lots to look at. Don’t be intimidated. There’s a lot that you can do, but it’s pretty easy to get started. First, you’ll probably want to change your password from something weird you were emailed to something you’ll remember. To do this, look at the very top of the screen where it says “Profile”, towards the right. You’ll be able to change your password there, and change any other options if you feel like it.
3. Next, practice writing a new post on the blog. On the left margin you’ll see that it says “Posts”, and beneath that it says “add new”. Click that, and then try typing something into the box that appears. You should explore all the options and try to figure out how to add photos. But if it’s too complicated, don’t get intimidated, you don’t have to do anything advanced unless you want to. Publish your blog post and see what it looks like. If you have trouble during this process, here are a couple resources for learning the basics of Wordpress that might be helpful:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts
http://codex.wordpress.org/Working_with_WordPress
4. Practice writing a new page as well. Then delete your page. Or delete your post. Or edit it. Just practice.
5. Now, in the left sidebar, click where it says “Appearance”, and under that click on “Widgets”. Add any widgets you like, adjust their order, edit them, and see what you like.
Once you’re good and ready, write up an introductory post to share with your friends and neighbors, and delete this post to make this blog your own. What we’ve given you today isn’t a finished product, and you should feel free to request changes or new features whenever you think of them. It may be a couple months before we come through with any big feature upgrades, but if there are small things we may be able to do them sooner.
Have fun!
