New Home Page and Menus

Today is home page and menu day. I am relying on the power of the ThemeFusion documentation and videos. Today I am also documenting as I do things. Take a peek.

Home Page
I had already created the file for the page that I wanted to be my home page. I needed to now show it instead of the Avada template. A quick check in the documentation and I navigated within WordPress to Settings - Reading. I set the Front page display to static page with the Front page being the page I created and named Saint Michael School - Cranford NJ. The posts page is called Recent Work. It is a blog that will work as our news page. Now when I type the URL smscranford.com/wp I see my school page. I still need to go over to HostGator to set smscranford.com to show the WordPress page instead of the HostGator menu.

Retina Ready Image
This morning the menu was the sales pitch menu for Avada. I created an SMS Overview page. It will be part of the About Us drop down. For this page, I uploaded an image that is twice the size I need it. I hope I am doing this the right way. I want the image to be 903x305 so I made the original 1806x610.

While viewing the Avada Retina Ready video, I learned about the WP Retina 2x plugin. It checks to see if the images you upload are retina ready. When I did the check it showed that my image was still too small for large or portfolio full sizes. I still have to think more about this. It seems for large the image needs to be at least 2049x1054 and for portfolio-full it should be 1800x800. These numbers are hard to attain with cropping.

When I put the image on the WordPress page, I brought in the full size image and dragged it down to 903x305. I am not sure if this is what I should be doing, but now the full image is there in the file.

Menu Structure

I knew what I wanted the menu to look like. I was able to make it happen. The Appearance - Menus section has the structure of the sales menu that came with the theme. I did not want to delete those items immediately for fear of losing the menu structure all together. I started by dragging my personal Recent News under the existing word Home. Then I removed the sample drop down entries for Home Version 1 through 15. I created three sample pages for the About Us section yesterday: SMS Overview, Brochure, and Philosophy. I quickly and easily changed the word Slider to About Us and continued on. At this point, I got brave, I deleted all the submenu items from the sample data and changed all the drop down headings to my wording.

This is where I ran into a problem. I had, potentially, 12 menu entries and the theme had nine. By looking through the ThemeFusion documentation, I learned that there is a custom links section. By typing # in the URL entry and a label I could create a menu entry that is not an existing web page on the site. I then added my pre-created pages to that choice.

The 12 entries wrapped around and made two rows of menu choices. This did not look elegant. We were really happy with the Header Version 1 and it is what I initially chose. I ended up switching Header Version 4. We did not want that version initially because of the social icons in the header, but in true Avada style I found a check box in Theme Options - Header Options and was able to restrict it from showing. We will have those options at the bottom of the page.

Tomorrow I will be madly creating most of the content for the remaining pages. This has been a great experience overall!