Configuring Your Free Equestrian Event Website

If you haven't applied for your free website yet, see CreatingAnEventWebsite.

At this point you will have received an email explaining how to access your website administration page. This administration page allows you to upload new pictures, change all the text on your website and enter events. Your site is not yet live so you can experiment to get the look you require.

Any events you enter will immediately appear on EquiPortal's equestrian event calendar so only enter real event details!

Your First Configuration Change

Let's start by making a few simple changes to your website. Click on the link "General settings for all your website". The following page will open in a new window:

• The first tab holds various details that you can change, such as the colour scheme, website title and your contact email address. Try making changes and then visit your test website to see how it looks.
• The second tab provides tips about configuring this specific page.
• The third tab describes formatting techniques that you can optionally use to further enhance your website.

To begin with enter a title for your website. This will appear over the header picture on every page. Next choose a colour scheme and finally enter your own email address in the input box provided and click the "update" button. I hope you agree that this is a very simple way of changing the text on your website.

Disabling Menu Options

You may not need all the functionality that we provide in our template. For example, a horse trainer will not need a page to show event competition results. To disable a menu option, click on the "Menu Options" link. The page displayed shows all your menu options. You can change the text for each menu option here. If you delete the text for a menu option, the associated page will be disabled, e.g. delete the word "Results" to disable the results page.

Configuring Your Homepage

You are now ready to set up your first full page. Click on the link "The Home Page" to see the page shown to the right. Refer to the "Show Help" tab for more information about configuring each page.

Search Engines

The first three inputs you configure are important to search engines. It is important that these details are different on each of your pages.

• Window Title controls what appears in the title at the top of the browser's window.
• Meta Description allows you to enter a short description that will be displayed in search engine results.
• Meta Keywords should be populated with words or phrases you think someone would enter in to a search engine to find your website. If a word or phrase is important enough to appear here is must also appear somewhere else in this page too.

Search engines use the words that appear in these sections to decide when your page should be displayed in search results. So, if you want people to find your website when they search for "ABC Stables", you could enter:

• Window Title ABC Stables Home Page
• Meta Description Welcome to ABC Stables. Our Yorkshire based livery yard is close to the Trans Pennine Trail and is host to our monthly show jumping events.
• Meta Keywords ABC Stables, Yorkshire, livery yard, livery, show jumping, show, jumping, event, Trans Pennine Trail

Get the idea? Important phrases such as "ABC Stables" appear in all three areas. They should appear in the rest of the page too to increase the chance of people finding you on a search engine.

Repeating Sections

Many pages have sections that are repeatable, i.e. it's up to you if you have none, 1 or as many as you like. On the homepage a repeatable section allows you to have a picture, define it's position, a section heading and a block of text.

• You can add and remove repeating sections using the links provided.
• You can cycle through the sections using the "Previous" and "Next" links.
• You can change the order of the sections using the "<" and ">" links to move the current section backward or forward in the list.

Have a play with the home page. You can achieve different looks by combining sections with different picture positions, optionally including headings and various amounts of text.

Further Changes

Play around with the other maintenance pages. Each has different fields and repeatable sections to meet the specific requirements of the page.

Hopefully you are now starting to see how you can make your website unique and tailored to your own needs.

Next Step: PicturesOnYourEventWebsite
Previous Step : CreatingAnEventWebsite