You’ve just installed Interspire Website Publisher—now what?

Getting started with your new website design can be overwhelming, especially if you have not worked with Interspire Website Publisher before.

After installing the software, it is a good idea to get familiar with the Administration system and how it is organized before working on specific tasks.

Log in as the as the administrator, http://www.yourdomain.com/admin and click on the Settings link in the upper right side of the Administrator page, then click on the drop-down link called Website Settings. As the page refreshes, note that the Administration system uses tabs and sub-tabs to organize different pages in the behind the scenes.

There are a number of form fields in each of the different areas under Website Settings. Go through each and look for form fields that are blank . . . most of these will need information to be filled in at some point before launching your website. If you are curious about any form field, click on the “?” icon on the right side of the field for a brief explanation.

TIP: If you encounter anything that doesn’t make sense to you or you are not sure about it, just leave it alone for now. Only change or add in information where you are confident you know what you are doing.

You may also want to go through all the Administration tabs and sub tabs to become more familiar with all the different functions you can perform as the Administrator.

Choose a template

When you first install Interspire Website Publisher, the default template will be chosen. Unless you like the default template, navigate over to the Design tab, then select Website Design to see other templates that are available for you to select. When Interspire Website Publisher is installed, only a few templates are included, but many other templates are available for downloading for free from within the Administration area of your website.

There is also a Download Templates tab, which you can use to see what other templates are available from Interspire for downloading. You can download just the one or two you are interested in, or several.

TIP: Viewing a thumbnail image will just give you an impression of what the template will be like “life-size”. Always download and test a template on your website so you truly experience how well it works.

You can go back to the Website Design tab after downloading additional templates from Interspire, then click on the template you want to use to activate it. The selected template thumbnail will be highlighted then the page will save. Wait until you get the green check icon with the message, “Your site is now using the “XXXXX” template,” before proceeding.

TIP: You can use the View Your Website link in the upper right corner of the Administration page to check out the new template.

Determine your navigation structure

Before adding any pages to your website, it is a good idea to have an outline of some sort showing your main navigation structure, before you start creating pages within the website.

You will notice that all of the Interspire templates use a horizontal navigation layout for primary navigation links. Ideally you should have a handful of primary pages and then add sub-pages or “secondary” pages as drop-down menu items.

TIP: Most of the templates will acomodate between 7 and 10 main navigation links across the top of the page, depending on how short or how long the link is.

Primary, secondary and tertiary navigation

To give website visitors an easy way to navigate your website, where possible, use drop-downs menus for secondary pages and tertiary drop-down menus for tertiary pages. This approach will give the visitor access to all your website pages from any pages for the most part.

TIP: Not all the templates support rollover and double-drop down menus in order to show secondary and tertiary page links when you roll over the primary navigation link. It is important to first test to make sure the template you want to use can support your navigation structure or be prepared to do some CSS work on the template.

Before jumping in and creating your website as you go along, it’s a better idea to map out your website on paper. Use an outline format and just indent to show secondary and tertiary pages. Once you have your website map down on paper or in a Word document, review it and make changes. Using this approach, it will be much easier to construct your pages following the same structure using Interspire Website Publisher.

Adding placeholder pages

First, create pages in the Interspire Website Publisher Administration area. In most cases you will want to create content as Web Pages. You can create different content types, but for your website pages, create the pages as web pages so it will be easy to add in secondary and tertiary pages.

Create your primary navigation pages first. As you create new pages, you will need to create a title for the page. Shorter titles will work better and you may want to drop in some dummy page text as placeholder text in order to save the page.

After adding all your primary pages into the site, use the View Your Website link to see how you navigation links are fitting in the template.  If needed, go back and shorten the titles of your longer page titles so they all will fit across the page.

Add your secondary pages under the the primary pages which have sub-pages. Again, check your work as you go along to make sure your drop down menus look as you expect them to. You can easily switch between templates after you create your pages to see how the website looks with different templates.

To make a page appear beneath a primary page, just create the new page or go back to already created pages and in the Page Details section, just above the page content editor, you can assign the Parent Menu item for the page you have open.  If you select nothing, the page will automatically become a primary page. Choosing the drop down list “-- Please choose a content item --” will allow you to assign the new page to another page.

Tertiary pages are created the same way, by assigning new pages underneath a secondary page. Be sure to save your work as you go along.

TIP: Always review your website to make sure your pages are showing up correctly as secondary and/or tertiary pages.

Once you are happy with your overall structure, you can begin to add actual page text and images to each of your pages.