The UMW.EDU theme comes equipped with the ability to make a slideshow for your home page. In this tutorial, we will show how to do this.
Set Your Home Page
You need to have a home page that is a static page, then designate which page is your home page before we begin. If you need a refresher on how to do this, visit this tutorial.
Prepare your Images
By default, the home page slide show is 710px x 300px. There is a way to add more slideshow sizes, but for the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll work with the default. You’ll need to prepare your images at 710px x 300px and have them available on your computer. before beginning. Once your home page is set, go to the editing screen for your home page.
Click on the little sun shape –
– to “Add Media.” This will let you attach images to your page. If possible, use the Flash uploader — that allows you to upload all of your slides at once. For a refresher on adding images, view this video.
Here, you will not “insert image” once you upload. As soon as you’ve uploaded all of your images, simply click “Save All Changes.”
Then, click the black “x” on the top right-hand corner.
Now, you’ll need to save a draft of your page so that the images become “attached.” Simply go to the Publish box on the right and click “Save Draft.”
After saving the draft, the editing page will refresh, and you’ll see the yellow bar saying “Page Draft Updated.” Staying on the editing screen, scroll down the page until you get to a box called “Slideshow.” There, you will see all of the images you just uploaded, each with a checkbox next to it, and some fields to the right. A single slide listing looks like this:
Here is what to do with each slide:
- Click the checkbox next to each slide you want to use.
- Type in a Caption, which is the large heading. Make it short – 2-3 words maximum.
- Type in a description — This can be about 5 – 6 words long.
- If you want to link to something from the image, type it into the “Link” window.
- Check “Open link in thickbox” if you want the link to popup over the page.
- Type in the number of the slide order. Leave it blank if you want to have the slides appear in the order they are listed.
- Click the checkbox next to “Activate this slideshow.” Left unchecked, the slideshow will not appear on the page.
- On Display, you have 3 choices, as follows:
- Above Content: This will place it above the main page/post content area.
- Below Content: This will place it below the main page/post content area.
- Advanced Shortcode or PHP Function: This should be selected if it is your site’s homepage. The site’s homepage is automatically set up to place the slideshow in a fixed location.
- Size: It defaults to the 710 X 300
- Effect: There are many choices in this menu — you can experiment with any number of them.
- Speed: This is how quickly it changes from slide to slide. I’ve set the one above to 1 second.
- Timeout: This is how long a slide displays until it changes. I’ve set the one above to 6 seconds.
- Pause: This defaults to “yes” — I would keep it there.
- Animate: Choose “yes” if you want the slides to automatically move. Choose “no” if you want people to use the arrows to advance the slides manually.
- NEW!!! Randomize the order of the images? Check this box if you want to ignore the image order and have the images load in a random fashion each time the page comes up.
Once these are set, save the draft and preview. Make adjustments as needed, and publish when it’s ready!
