Quick Start Guide

Content preparation: Quick Start

Need to get going fast? We totally understand. Gather the following content and answers ahead of time to stand up a site quickly.

Full names, email addresses and profile photos of everyone involved in your lab.: iSearch photos work well, as do ASU Engineering Open Studio portraits.; Make sure that the photos are at least 600px by 600px. A square crop is recommended but is not completely necessary.
Decide how you want to organize the resulting list of people within your site.: We recommend an initial classification structure of principal investigator / graduate student / undergraduate student to get started quickly.
Does your lab have a general research theme?: If so, great! Write up a brief paragraph that summarizes the basic idea. Use everyday language as much as possible.; Find one representative image of the theme and keep it handy.; Research topic pages make for fantastic “home” pages for your site, if you are struggling for additional content.
You’ll want to create separate pages for each active research project within your lab.: Focus on the in-flight projects at first. You can go back and fill in the details from completed projects at a later point in time.; You’ll need at least one solid paragraph of text per project. For active projects, a hypothesis statement or even a published abstract will work.; Gather any related images and illustrations from the project to provide some visual “punch” to the page.
Be sure to link the research project pages to the people responsible for working on them.: The button to check is in the sidebar for the people or project you just created.
Do you have a list of publications associated with your lab in a document?: Feel free to get started quickly by copy/pasting this document into a default “page” within the theme.; You can pull out additional details from key publications within the list and create separate entries for each publication at a later point.
Created pages don’t show up automatically in the site’s navigation. You need to do that manually.: Use the WordPress customizer to see what those changes looks like as you are making them.; Entries in the navigation menu can be nested one level deep. The top item in a nested menu isn’t clickable. Create a placeholder by using a custom link with the URL set to an empty hashtag (URL: #); To add a directory page (which is built for you automatically when you create individual profile pages), locate the People Archive page from the top of the People list and change it’s name to Directory.; A link for Home is automatically created at the top of the main menu. No need to manually create this item.
The “home page” for your site can be set to whichever piece of content you would like.: Access the setting for this under Settings --> Reading.; Set it to display a static page and choose the desired page from the drop down menu immediately below.