We are going to now look at Customizing the Twenty Seventeen theme.

Now click on the Customize button to enter the theme and start working on it.
There is a lot to do in Customize.

Site Identity

Click on Site Identity to open up the options.
We will do Logo last.

Site Tile could be your Location.

Tagline could be something about you.

Do put a tick in Display Site Title and Tagline.

Site Icon is used in several places and for YWAM sites I have this one that I use.
Go ahead and right click this image and download it your your Downloads folder.
Then you can click Select site icon, and upload this image to your site.
When uploading, if you are asked to crop the image just click on Skip cropping.

Now we can use the same image as the Logo. When you load the logo you will have to click Crop image, but it will not do anything as there is nothing to crop.

Once you have done these things, click on Publish at the top of this settings bar.

Nicely Done. You can click the little Left Point back arrow to get back to Customizing

Colors

Colors we can ignore, they do not do a lot, but you could play with them if you want to.

Header Media

Home Page Video

Click on Header Media to set up your Home page.

Do you have a short video that show cases where you are?

10 to a maximum of 15 seconds.

In mp4, in HD.

You can upload it and have it shown to people that land on your home page.

If you do one off a smart phone, it may or may not look good.

This is where you get to play around and experiment.

Home page pictures

You could also just upload a singular picture.

Make sure it is at least 2000 px wide by about 1200 px high.

You may have to play around with it a bit to get what you want of the picture in the right position.

  1. Click on Add new image.
  2. Find the image on your computer that you have adjusted to your needs.
  3. Upload it.
  4. Click on Select and crop.
  5. Do crop it, again you might do this several times to get what you want.
  6. Review
  7. Once again click Publish at the top of the page to save.

If you want to you can add more than one picture, and you can randomize them

Menus

We will get in to menus in its own help section here.

Widgets

We will get in to widgets in its own section here.

Homepage Settings

The settings are as simple as choosing a static page as your landing page.

You have to create this page, look here on how to do that.

Theme Options

The first part of the Theme Options is pretty straight forward, I always set it to One Column, so change your settings to reflects this.

This next area is where we have some great options to quickly make your website easy to look at.

You have four pages you can select here with their Featured Picture.

You have to create these page, look here on how to do that. And the featured picture needs to be about 2000 px by 1200 px.

If you look at this website, https://ywam.life/, or this one, https://opensourcegathering.net.nz/ or this one, https://surigao.ywam.life/, you can see how these pictures can be presented and the pages give a good quick overview of your site.

So go to the Pages lesson, and create your first four pages, something like:

  1. Home: this is your landing page, you can think about having a slide show of pictures, and a link through to more about you.
  2. Latest News: It is good to change this page out at least once a month to keep your site fresh.
  3. Opportunities: what can people and teams do if the come to work with you? Use this for staff recruitment as well.
  4. About Us: you could have sections for the various people on staff, some history, and testimonials.

These four items can also be come the bases of your menu system.

That about does it for this section.

As you can see even as you work on your Appearance you also have to create pages and menus. Look at those lessons to get those sections completed.

Thought for today.

Success is flecked, it is hard to learn from success, for rarely do you know what it was that you did right.

Failure is a fantastic teacher, right away you can know what you did wrong. (And maybe from every one else as well.)

I have learnt so much from my mistakes, I am planning to do some new ones.

Failure is only failure if you keep doing the same mistakes expecting a different outcome.