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Weebly Archive- Getting Started
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Categories
Page Admins
SETUP
Allright so. *cracks knuckles* First, you're gonna want to go to weebly.com, and sign up for an account. Use an email that you know you can receive emails at, just in case you have to eventually verify it. Now, you'll be at a screen that shows themes. Look through them, see what you like. Below are some examples of pages I've made, so you can see some of the options. I generally prefer clean, simple lines for my own stuff, but I've made others that are flashier. You can always try out a new theme anytime if you choose one and then realize you hate it.
Portfolio, Clean Lines theme- http://darksidearchives.weebly.com/
Business tab, Stripes theme- http://www.mandikonesni.com
Personal tab, Superset- http://www.deceptivelyderangedreviews.weebly.com
Next, it'll pop up with a box asking you to setup your domain. It costs money to buy a domain or use one you already own, so we're going to use the "Weebly Subdomain" option. Basically, like the two example sites above, your domain will have weebly.com at the end of it. If your first idea for a name is taken, try adding "archive" to it, or roleplay, or some other word to make it unique.
Now, you'll be on your "main" page. To the left, you'll see an elements box. That's basically all the "pieces" you use to create your site. Up top, you'll see "Build, Pages, Theme, Store, Settings". Go to Pages first. There, you'll set your pages. I usually use blogs for posts and photos, and standard for everything else. If you have AU and Canon posts, you may want to make two blog pages there, one for AU and one for Canon. On the "Pages" tab, click the little plus sign on the left and select the kind of page you want, blog or standard.
Add the name, select your header... I usually choose no header on mine, to keep the content at the forefront, but you can add a short header or tall header to put different cover photos on each page. Hit Save. You can drag your pages in that left hand column to put them in the order you like. You can delete the Contact or About pages if you don't want them. Heck, you can delete the Home page if you want, the next page in the list will move up to the "Home" page slot if you remove the default one.
On the right hand side of blog pages, you'll see a sidebar. It's up to you if you want to keep all of it, or if you want to delete some. I usually delete "Author" and "RSS Feed". For photo blogs, I leave Categories there. For writing blogs, I leave Archives there. Showing both-
Archive- http://darksidearchives.weebly.com/aristas-posts
Categories- http://darksidearchives.weebly.com/aristas-photos
To delete anything, just hover over it, and you'll see an X in the corner. Click it, and the item is gone.
BUILD
Now, feel free to take a look at the Settings tab. I generally just use it to turn off the "Group Excess Pages under More" option, cause instead of putting them on another line as shown for the Ds one, it instead puts a "more" link at the end and you have to click to see the rest of the pages. You can turn add or turn off the site title, which will show your site title on the top of every page. Under Blogs, you can put how many you want to show on one page, turn off the "share" buttons if you don't like the way they look, and turn off comments. If you want to get rid of the comments element completely to make it look cleaner, let me know. It does require coding, but I have the codes and can tell you right where to put them.
Under Theme, you'll see the options for your site. Some themes have different colors you can choose. You can adjust the size of the fonts to how you like them, you can change the colors of the links, that sort of stuff. You can also change the theme here, if you find you don't quite like the one you chose. Generally, you can leave the stuff at default for now. And then once you see how everything looks, then you can start tweaking the fonts to see if making them bigger/smaller looks better to you.
And that brings us to "Build", the fun part, because then you're actually building your site. All those buttons along the left hand side there are drag and drop. Go to the Pages tab again, select the page you want to work on. For standard pages, you just click an item there, and drag it over. IE, Paragraph titles, text, images, buttons. You can add a youtube video embedded, or files and documents if you like. You arrange them once they're on the page, after you drag and drop, you can then drag the elements to a new place to sort them. It automatically creates columns if you drag an item next to another item.
I usually start with the main/homepage. Pick a picture, add buttons or whatnot. Anything you add, you can click to edit. Buttons, you add the links in a box that opens when you click it. Text and titles, you add them by clicking. Clicking on an image box, it opens a popup to upload your photo.
POSTING
At this step, hit "Publish". This sets up your site and gets it officially published, so that any changes you make from now on will go live when you hit "Publish" again.
Now, you're ready to work on your archives. To download pics, I just make a folder in my Downloads folder, called my charry name. Inside, I make a Pics and a Posts folder. Inside the Pics one, I put what photos they are/the album names. That way, you can upload them all at once as galleries. Now, I do it the way I do so that I have multiple copies. Most people wouldn't save everything like shown in the attached pic, but it shows you the general setup on how I personally gather everything of mine, so you can decide what's the best/easiest way for you to gather your items. Once you have everything, it's time to start posting.
So you go to the Photos blog page you made, and click the button at the bottom to start a new post. Add a title, like Profile Photos, and drag the "Gallery" option into the blog post. That'll let you upload all of your profile photos in one go. To the left, click on "Post Options". It's the blue button at the bottom. That'll open the post otions. You can add your category here. Hit enter after adding Profile Photos as the category, that'll save it. Now, if you don't want all your photos to show up in one huge long page, drag the Read More element up above the gallery. That'll make it look like this- http://darksidearchives.weebly.com/aristas-photos/category/all Then hit the orange Post button to post it. For categories, you'll need to hit Publish to see them show up in the blog sidebar on the live site.
For posts, first copy from RPL and paste into a notepad document. This strips the hyperlinks and stuff, so it's just plain text. You'll want to run through and format it a smidge. I generally remove the likes from it, and separate the name and the post with a space if there isn't one. Like this- http://darksidearchives.weebly.com/aimees-posts/interrogation Once you get used to it, it takes like 5 minutes, once you're done with a post, to format and archive it. So, you get it formatted, open Weebly. Go to your posts blog page, hit "New Post". Put in the first paragraph, then a read more bar. Then the rest of the post. That'll leave it nicely formatted so they have to click to read more to view the rest of that post, instead of making one long, never ending page.
You can drag in a photo if the post was in comments on a photo, like I've done here- http://darksidearchives.weebly.com/aristas-posts/hide-in-plain-sight Anything that comes with an embed code, like a gif or video, you can use the "Embed" element to put in there too. If you want to date them the same time that you had posted it, once you're all done with it, go up and change the date and then click "Post". If you do it beforehand, it tends to reset itself for some damn reason, so I wait to change the date till right before I'm ready to post it.
To make it easier on myself, I usually pick one character. Download their pictures, then upload them by album name. Then I go through and open each group page they're in and scroll for any posts of theirs, saving all from that ONE page. I then continue down the line, doing a page a day, or whatever I'm capable of when I'm bored. Once that's done, I go to my profile page, scan for anything there I want to keep. Then to blogs, and save those. Once you're done, you'll have everything backed up on Weebly, which gives unlimited space. After that, every time a post is finished, take the 5 minutes to format and archive, and you'll be able to keep a clean archive separate from RPL without much effort after that first run.
Most of the rest of learning Weebly is honestly just checking what things do by dragging them and clicking on them. But basically, you just built yourself a website archive. Congrats!
Allright so. *cracks knuckles* First, you're gonna want to go to weebly.com, and sign up for an account. Use an email that you know you can receive emails at, just in case you have to eventually verify it. Now, you'll be at a screen that shows themes. Look through them, see what you like. Below are some examples of pages I've made, so you can see some of the options. I generally prefer clean, simple lines for my own stuff, but I've made others that are flashier. You can always try out a new theme anytime if you choose one and then realize you hate it.
Portfolio, Clean Lines theme- http://darksidearchives.weebly.com/
Business tab, Stripes theme- http://www.mandikonesni.com
Personal tab, Superset- http://www.deceptivelyderangedreviews.weebly.com
Next, it'll pop up with a box asking you to setup your domain. It costs money to buy a domain or use one you already own, so we're going to use the "Weebly Subdomain" option. Basically, like the two example sites above, your domain will have weebly.com at the end of it. If your first idea for a name is taken, try adding "archive" to it, or roleplay, or some other word to make it unique.
Now, you'll be on your "main" page. To the left, you'll see an elements box. That's basically all the "pieces" you use to create your site. Up top, you'll see "Build, Pages, Theme, Store, Settings". Go to Pages first. There, you'll set your pages. I usually use blogs for posts and photos, and standard for everything else. If you have AU and Canon posts, you may want to make two blog pages there, one for AU and one for Canon. On the "Pages" tab, click the little plus sign on the left and select the kind of page you want, blog or standard.
Add the name, select your header... I usually choose no header on mine, to keep the content at the forefront, but you can add a short header or tall header to put different cover photos on each page. Hit Save. You can drag your pages in that left hand column to put them in the order you like. You can delete the Contact or About pages if you don't want them. Heck, you can delete the Home page if you want, the next page in the list will move up to the "Home" page slot if you remove the default one.
On the right hand side of blog pages, you'll see a sidebar. It's up to you if you want to keep all of it, or if you want to delete some. I usually delete "Author" and "RSS Feed". For photo blogs, I leave Categories there. For writing blogs, I leave Archives there. Showing both-
Archive- http://darksidearchives.weebly.com/aristas-posts
Categories- http://darksidearchives.weebly.com/aristas-photos
To delete anything, just hover over it, and you'll see an X in the corner. Click it, and the item is gone.
BUILD
Now, feel free to take a look at the Settings tab. I generally just use it to turn off the "Group Excess Pages under More" option, cause instead of putting them on another line as shown for the Ds one, it instead puts a "more" link at the end and you have to click to see the rest of the pages. You can turn add or turn off the site title, which will show your site title on the top of every page. Under Blogs, you can put how many you want to show on one page, turn off the "share" buttons if you don't like the way they look, and turn off comments. If you want to get rid of the comments element completely to make it look cleaner, let me know. It does require coding, but I have the codes and can tell you right where to put them.
Under Theme, you'll see the options for your site. Some themes have different colors you can choose. You can adjust the size of the fonts to how you like them, you can change the colors of the links, that sort of stuff. You can also change the theme here, if you find you don't quite like the one you chose. Generally, you can leave the stuff at default for now. And then once you see how everything looks, then you can start tweaking the fonts to see if making them bigger/smaller looks better to you.
And that brings us to "Build", the fun part, because then you're actually building your site. All those buttons along the left hand side there are drag and drop. Go to the Pages tab again, select the page you want to work on. For standard pages, you just click an item there, and drag it over. IE, Paragraph titles, text, images, buttons. You can add a youtube video embedded, or files and documents if you like. You arrange them once they're on the page, after you drag and drop, you can then drag the elements to a new place to sort them. It automatically creates columns if you drag an item next to another item.
I usually start with the main/homepage. Pick a picture, add buttons or whatnot. Anything you add, you can click to edit. Buttons, you add the links in a box that opens when you click it. Text and titles, you add them by clicking. Clicking on an image box, it opens a popup to upload your photo.
POSTING
At this step, hit "Publish". This sets up your site and gets it officially published, so that any changes you make from now on will go live when you hit "Publish" again.
Now, you're ready to work on your archives. To download pics, I just make a folder in my Downloads folder, called my charry name. Inside, I make a Pics and a Posts folder. Inside the Pics one, I put what photos they are/the album names. That way, you can upload them all at once as galleries. Now, I do it the way I do so that I have multiple copies. Most people wouldn't save everything like shown in the attached pic, but it shows you the general setup on how I personally gather everything of mine, so you can decide what's the best/easiest way for you to gather your items. Once you have everything, it's time to start posting.
So you go to the Photos blog page you made, and click the button at the bottom to start a new post. Add a title, like Profile Photos, and drag the "Gallery" option into the blog post. That'll let you upload all of your profile photos in one go. To the left, click on "Post Options". It's the blue button at the bottom. That'll open the post otions. You can add your category here. Hit enter after adding Profile Photos as the category, that'll save it. Now, if you don't want all your photos to show up in one huge long page, drag the Read More element up above the gallery. That'll make it look like this- http://darksidearchives.weebly.com/aristas-photos/category/all Then hit the orange Post button to post it. For categories, you'll need to hit Publish to see them show up in the blog sidebar on the live site.
For posts, first copy from RPL and paste into a notepad document. This strips the hyperlinks and stuff, so it's just plain text. You'll want to run through and format it a smidge. I generally remove the likes from it, and separate the name and the post with a space if there isn't one. Like this- http://darksidearchives.weebly.com/aimees-posts/interrogation Once you get used to it, it takes like 5 minutes, once you're done with a post, to format and archive it. So, you get it formatted, open Weebly. Go to your posts blog page, hit "New Post". Put in the first paragraph, then a read more bar. Then the rest of the post. That'll leave it nicely formatted so they have to click to read more to view the rest of that post, instead of making one long, never ending page.
You can drag in a photo if the post was in comments on a photo, like I've done here- http://darksidearchives.weebly.com/aristas-posts/hide-in-plain-sight Anything that comes with an embed code, like a gif or video, you can use the "Embed" element to put in there too. If you want to date them the same time that you had posted it, once you're all done with it, go up and change the date and then click "Post". If you do it beforehand, it tends to reset itself for some damn reason, so I wait to change the date till right before I'm ready to post it.
To make it easier on myself, I usually pick one character. Download their pictures, then upload them by album name. Then I go through and open each group page they're in and scroll for any posts of theirs, saving all from that ONE page. I then continue down the line, doing a page a day, or whatever I'm capable of when I'm bored. Once that's done, I go to my profile page, scan for anything there I want to keep. Then to blogs, and save those. Once you're done, you'll have everything backed up on Weebly, which gives unlimited space. After that, every time a post is finished, take the 5 minutes to format and archive, and you'll be able to keep a clean archive separate from RPL without much effort after that first run.
Most of the rest of learning Weebly is honestly just checking what things do by dragging them and clicking on them. But basically, you just built yourself a website archive. Congrats!