The Kiwanis International Convention in Las Vegas is rapidly approaching. If you haven’t done so already, now would be a great time to add the information about the convention to your site.

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Recently, we’ve had a few cases where someone tries to upload a photo or document that is over the 2mb limit. This post discusses this limit and options for optimizing your files to meet this requirement.

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Uploading a newsletter is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site. It gets members used to using the site and allows prospective members to check you out online.

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Based on several suggestions that we’ve received recently, we’ve added some new features that control how news stories are administered and displayed.

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Is your club doing a special project for the holidays? Bell ringing? Toy drive? Santa’s visit? Get the word out while making it easy for your members to find out what’s going on.

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More and more, we’re hearing from clubs that they want their members to be able to find information on the Home page. One way to accomplish this is to create multiple news stories on your Home page.

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Deleting your old news stories and previewing the content of news stories listed in News and Doc Admin just got easier. We’ve also added an automatic backup to your news stories so if you make a mistake, recovery is quick and painless.

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Your Home page text is one of the most critical pieces of information on your web site for two reasons: it’s your first impression with site visitors and search engines will rank your home page based on that text.

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Photos can add some “zing” to your news stories and adding them is a simple point-and-click operation that involves just two major steps: uploading the photo and inserting it into the news story.

Background: Why do I have to upload a photo before putting it in a news story?

When you add a photo to a document on your desktop, your text editor application knows where the photo is located and has access to that photo. Photos located on your desktop are not accessible by a web server. This is going to sound like a big circular argument, and it is, but photos must be on a web server to be accessible on the web. This means that you must either upload the photo to the web server or use another website address where the photo is located.

Part 1: Upload a Photo

• Go to your News story (Site Admin >> News and Doc Admin, click on the title or on Create a New News Story)
• Click the “Find and Upload a Photo” link or the Search icon
• Locate the file you wish to upload on your computer and click the “Open” button (the button may have a different name on some systems, but it is the submit button)
• Click the “Use this File” button ONCE
• Wait for the upload process to complete. If the file upload is successful, you will be returned to the photo data entry form and there will be a thumbnail preview of the photo. If the upload is unsuccessful, there should be an error message.

Part 2: Add the Photo to the News Story

• Position your cursor in the text editor exactly where you want the photo to appear in the news story
• Click the Insert/Edit an Image icon to bring up the image dialog box
• Find and select the image you want to upload in the image selection (left-hand) part of the image dialog box
• Click the Next button in the lower right-hand part of the image dialog box
• Set the text flow for the text around the image
  • Default: No wrap around or float. Text stops above or below image and image is on its own line.
  • Left: Text wraps around (floats) to the left of the image
  • Right: Text wraps around (floats) to the right of the image
• Set the distance to surrounding text. We usually recommend setting the value to 5 for each box. This will cause the surrounding text to stay at least 5 pixels from the image.
• Set a border around the image. We usually recommend a 2 px border. This creates a nice frame for the image.
• Reset the image dimensions, if necessary
• Click the Insert button when you’re done

Remember to save your work by clicking the submit button at the bottom of the form or by using the Save icon in the text editor itself. Either option will save your changes. Next, preview your work to be sure everything came out okay.

If your club uses our Standard Package, you have three news pages. Sometimes, though, clubs need different options.

In the traditional format, our Standard Package includes the following news pages:

• News
• Club History
• Sponsored Programs

The New Options

The News page, in its traditional format, includes space for news stories and a series of newsletter links, which run across the top of the lead news story. Now, you can choose to turn your News page into a page strictly for newsletters or a listing of news stories similar to a blog post page.

The newsletter format displays a list of all club newsletters. Each newsletter is displayed as a link and when the visitor clicks the link, a newsletter opens in a new window.

The “white board” or “blog post” displays a headline for each story, a short snippet of text, and a link to the full story. Once the full story displays, there’s a “Reply” link so that the visitor can comment on the story. Replies can only be created by logged-in members or by visitors who have previously registered.

Your Club History and Sponsored Programs pages can also be assigned these new formats. You can even have one of each type, if you choose.

How to Change a Page Type and/or Name

1. Go to Site Admin
2. Click on General Information
3. Click Site Configuration Options
4. Check the box “Make changes to page names in menu?”
5. Click the name of the page you want to change
6. The above box will open. You may enter a new name for the page or choose one of the other page formats.
7. When you are done, click “close edit box.”
8. To view your changed page, you’ll need to go to the public side of the site, then to your changed page. To get there, click “Home” at the top of your page, then click on the name of the news page.

Suggestions for Usage

1. If your club has trouble adding new news stories, but does regularly produce a newsletter, convert your News page to the Newsletters format and change the name of the page to “Newsletters.”
2. If your club has a big service project or fund raiser, but doesn’t use either the Club History or Sponsored Programs pages, change the name of one of those pages to the name of the service project or fund raiser. For details on this, see my previous post Expanding Your News Categories with Flexible Pages

Limitations

1. The only page that can accommodate both your news stories and newsletters is the News page. This means that if you want a page with both newsletter links and news stories, you must leave the page type for the News page as is. You can change the name, but not the type.
2. You cannot change the types of pages other than your news pages, i.e., you can’t turn one of your links pages into another news page.