Website Owner's Manual

Welcome to our Website Owner's Manual! We created this in 2021 to be accessible, available, and helpful to every client, 24/7, with the same personalized, quality service we always strive to provide.

The Website Owner's Manual allows clients to access everything they need to update, modify, and maintain their website's content — from logging in to publishing.

There are three separate sections:

1. Getting Started — Creating an account & logging into your CMS.
2. Learning your CMS — An overview of your CMS's features and settings.
3. Creating & Managing Content — How to create, edit, and maintain your site's content.

You can click on any of the three links above to jump to that particular section.

As always, if you run into something that needs our help (detailed more later), feel free to shoot us a text at +1 (405) 509-5494, or email jake@steelmandigital.com for the quickest response time.

Getting Started

Without further ado, let's jump right into your website!

What is a CMS? In the world of web design, CMS stands for content management system, and as the name suggests, it's a system for managing the content of your website. CMSs were invented for two primary reasons:

1. To help "non-technical" people maintain their websites.
2. To help everyone publish new content within a consistent design, anytime.

What can your CMS do? Content Management Systems are incredibly powerful tools, including the Webflow CMS your website was built with. Your CMS allows you to edit most any existing content on your website, including text (or "copy"), images, buttons, links, etc.

It also allows you to create some new pages and blog posts through Collections. Examples of collections are "Blog Posts," or "Portfolio Projects." Creating a blog post in your CMS automatically generates a new blog page (and links, where applicable) with a consistent style and design. We'll touch on this more later.

What can't your CMS do? While a CMS is an incredibly versatile and useful tool, there are still some things that you won't be able to do all by yourself. Certain things, like changing colors, spacing, layout, formatting, or creating and deleting pages require help from Carbon Creative. If you need something changed that can't be done in your CMS, contact us!

Setting up your account

First thing's first, let's get you an account.

Taking control of your beautiful new website starts with accessing its built-in content management system (CMS for short). And that process usually starts with an email from your website’s designer. 

It probably looks a bit like this:

If needed, you can search "Jake Steelman wants you to help manage " in your inbox, and it should pull up the email. If it doesn't, please send an email to jake@carboncreative.io and request another invitation.

When you click that button, you’ll be taken to your website’s CMS — which, at first, will look just like your new website. After a couple of seconds, you should see a grey bar across the bottom, with a simple login form.

Next, you'll fill out the information in the form with your first and last name (your email is pre-filled) and choose a password you can remember. Write it down someplace safe. If you forget it, send us an email and we can reset your password.

Now, your content management system should look just like your website — except there’s a toolbar with two browser-like tabs labeled Pages, Collections and/or Forms, plus a series of icons. All of that will be explained below.

For now, take a moment to bookmark this page so you can easily return to it later. In most browsers, you can bookmark a page by holding Command + D on a Mac or Control + D on a Windows computer.

Otherwise, you can always return to your site’s content management system by simply typing the URL, then adding /?edit to the end.

So if your website’s URL is yourwebsite.com, just go to yourwebsite.com/?edit to log in and start editing.

When you return to your site later, you may see a little pencil icon in the lower right, which you can click to hop into your CMS. Rest assured that only those with access to the CMS will see this icon!

With the basics out of the way, let's dig into the CMS itself.

Getting to Know Your CMS

Now that you’ve created an account for your site’s CMS and know how to get back in to it anytime, let’s get to know the interface itself.

Let’s start with the two tabs on the left, Pages and Collections. These are your CMS’s two default tabs. You’ll be able to open more tabs, as you’ll see later, but these two will always be there for you.

The Pages Tab

The Pages tab, as you might imagine, contains a list of your site’s pages. It’ll be divided into at least two sections, but probably more: 

Static Pages:

Static pages are essentially "regular" pages. Content on these pages is static, in other words, it doesn't change. Examples of static pages on your site may include Home, About , Services, Products, Contact, etc.

Dynamic Pages:

Also referred to as Collection pages, these are pages automatically generated from your Collections, and can include things like a blog, portfolio, reviews, and more. These are listed with their Collection name.

Dynamic pages are like skeletons. Every human has the same skeleton, but we all have different skin, hair, and eye colors, as well as personalities. Dynamic pages provide a structure for your content. For example, each blog post page on your site will have different content, but the same overall structure. This content is easily managed through the CMS, which we'll get to soon.

What you can do in the Pages tab

The Pages tab allows you to do several things:

1. Search for a page by name: Type a page’s name into the search bar to find it. Note that this is exact-match search, and it only searches the page’s name, so you’ll need to enter a word or words that appear in the page’s name exactly.
2. Go to a page: Just click the page name in the list to collapse the Pages tab and view the page. Once you’re there, you can add and edit content to your website just like writing in a text editor.
3. Manage page settings: When you hover your cursor over a page in the list, you’ll see a button labeled “Settings” appear. There, you can manage vital page settings like SEO title and description, Open Graph title and description, and Open Graph image, as well as sections for custom code if you need to add that to your site.

Managing page settings

Because these page settings are so important for search and social, let’s dig a little deeper into what each of these settings actually means, and how you can make the most of them.

SEO Settings

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of building and improving websites in order to improve their chances of being found through search engines like Google, Bing, etc.

While most of what SEO covers requires a dedicated search engine optimization agency (like Carbon Creative!) there are certain elements that you are able to edit.

In each page’s settings, you can create and edit the following page-specific SEO settings:

1. Meta title: A page’s title plays a very important role in its visibility and performance in search engines, both because it a) tells search engines what the page is about and b) is what search engine users will click on to reach your site. Be sure to include the types of words people use to describe your business in the title. Ideally, a page’s title should be about 55 to 60 characters long.
   
   Example If I were building a website for a Oklahoma City area lawn care company, I’d probably title my homepage “Oklahoma City Lawn Care.” Then I might have other pages like “Edmond Lawn Care” and “Norman Lawn Care.”
   
   
2. Meta description: The description allows you to add a little more detail about your page (about 150 characters of it). It’s important for search, but not nearly as important as the title.

The Search Result Preview section shows you what the content you’ve entered will look like on a Google search results page. If any of your text gets cut off in the preview, you’ll want to trim your text to fit.

Open Graph (OG) Settings

Open Graph settings are very similar to SEO settings, except that they’re used by social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If you use any of these social networks, you’ve seen Open Graph at work many times.

In most cases, you can just tick the checkbox to use the same content as your SEO title and description. But feel free to customize it, if you’d like.

Open Graph also allows you to specify an image to be displayed along with your title and description.

The Collections Tab

The Collections tab is very similar to the Pages tab, but it only lists your Collection content — the stuff we created with the CMS.

Here, inside the collections tab, you'll see a list of all your collections on the website. For example, on the Carbon Creative website, we have 5 collections: Projects, Blog Posts, Employees, Reviews, and Services. When you click on a Collection, such as Projects, you’ll be taken to a new tab with a list of all the items in the Collection.

To start creating a new item within this Collection, click the green + New Project button in the top right hand corner of the window, and fill out the item’s various fields, paying close attention to the help text and other requirements for each.  

You can also click on any of the items in the collection and edit the fields of existing items.

What you see within an individual Collection item will change based on the structure of the Collection it belongs to, but you’ll see several elements over and over again: 

1. Back Button: Click this to go back to the list of items in this Collection.
2. View on Site: This light grey button collapses the CMS to show you the item you’re currently viewing right on your live website. If you’d like, you can edit its contents there instead of in this panel.
3. Status: Shows the current status of the item you’re viewing. Statuses include Published, Staged Changes, and Draft.‍
4. Draft checkbox: Tick this checkbox if you aren’t finished creating or editing the current item. Anything that isn’t marked as a draft will be published when someone clicks the Publish button! ‍
5. Changelog: As you make changes within your CMS, it will record the number of items and pages you’ve changed until you click Publish. You can click on the changelog to see a list of items and pages that have unpublished changes, along with who made them, if you have fellow CMS users. ‍
6. View Site: Click this to view your website. You can use any links on your website to move between pages in this view.

What do each of the statuses mean?

Every item in your CMS will have one of these statuses.

1. Published: the item in question is currently live on the site and viewable by visitors
2. Staged for Publish: you created the item and all of the fields, but haven't published it to your site yet, so it's not visible to new site visitors. Everything you create will start out as "Staged for Publish," until you publish them, at which point they become published and visitors can see them.
3. Staged Changes: you made changes to a published item, but the changes haven't been published, so visitors cannot see the changes (they can only see the last published version).
4. Draft: the item is only viewable by you. It won't publish unless you manually stage changes to it.

The Save button will save your changes and return you to the collection list view. When you click the save button, one of the four above statuses will be assigned to the item:

1. If the item's required fields (marked with a red asterisk) are incomplete, the item will automatically be saved as a draft. You won't be able to change the status until all of the required fields are filled out.
2. If the item's required fields are filled out, and the item is a new item, i.e. you just created it, it will be assigned the status of "Staged for Publish."
3. If the item's required fields are filled out, AND the item is an existing item, i.e. you made changes to the existing item, it will be assigned the status of "Staged Changes."

Manually changing item statuses

Sometimes, you'll need to manually change an item's status. You'll do this with the dropdown arrow next to the Save button, located in the upper right hand corner of the screen when viewing an item.

On an item that's Published, Staged Changes, or Staged for Publish, the Save button's flyout menu (click the down arrow) has the options:

• Publish: Immediately publish this item only.
  ‍Useful if you're working on other changes elsewhere on your site, but you'd like to publish this item now without publishing other changes.
  ‍
• Save as draft: Change the status of this item to draft, and save your changes.
  Useful if you don't want this item to go live when publishing other parts of your site.
  ‍
• Schedule: - Set a time and date to automatically publish this item only.
  Useful if, well, you want to schedule something to go live at a specified time.

However, if you're viewing an item that's currently Draft status, the button's text is "Save draft," and the "Save as draft" option that was just discussed is now "Stage for publish."

Clicking the big orange "Save draft" button will save your changes, but leave the item as a draft. If you're ready to publish the item in question, for example, you'll want to click "Stage for publish.," which does the reverse of "Save as draft," and vice versa.

"Publish" and "Schedule" are the same, no matter what the status of the item is.

How publishing works in your CMS

While you make changes to your site, you'll notice a blue "Publish" button in the top right. This button will publish your entire website, including changes to the copy, media, and any new or updated collection items. It's essentially the "master" Publish button.

Every time you click the blue Publish button in your CMS, your whole website gets republished. Any collection item with a "staged for publish" or "staged changes" status gets published. Drafts, as mentioned, stay as drafts until you explicitly stage them for publish using the flyout menu on the 'Save draft' button.

If you know that other collaborators from your team are working on the site when you're ready to publish, you may want to ask them if they're ready for their changes to go live. We don't want incomplete copy on the website!

The Forms Tab

Your CMS will most likely include a Forms tab. If you head over to the Forms tab on your site, you'll be able to see a broad overview of user-submitted form data. In other words, this is where you'll see what people are saying on your contact forms or lead generation forms.

The Forms Tab is grouped by title. For example, you might have two forms on your site, one on the contact page, and one on the services page. You'll be able to see data for "Contact Page Form" and "Service Page Form," so you'll get an idea of what forms are performing better and on what pages.

Regardless, if you look at the bottom left hand corner of each section, you'll see a button that says "Download CSV." This will allow you to download ALL form data and import it into a spreadsheet app for easier viewing. We strongly encourage doing this.

In order to help you import this data into a spreadsheet, click here for Importing CSV to Google Sheets, and click here for Importing CSV to Microsoft Excel. '