Drupal tutorial - Drupal end user guide

Welcome to the Drupal end-user guide.  This user guide assumes that you have certain modules installed on your site (see recommend modules), many of which give you significantly more control over your site.  If you're an existing client of 1 Website Designer, we will have installed these modules for you.

If this doesn't apply to you, you will still find useful information here about creating content in Drupal and answers to some common questions.  We also provide an overview of how to write content for search engines.

Getting started in Drupal

Login using your username and password and navigate to any page on your site.  You will notice that at the top of each page there are now 2 tabs:

To edit a page simply click the Edit tab.

If you wish to instead, create a new page, click 'Create content' from the Administration menu (pictured below), then choose 'Page'.  After this the process is much the same to Edit or Add a page.

You are then presented with a series of fields. The important ones are:

TITLE

By default this is the Title that appears both at the top of the page and the 'metatag' title which is used by search engines.  In the example below, Creative Website Design and Promotion is the title as it appears on a search in Google.

This is one of the important things search engines look at when deciding where to place a site in the search results, so for example:

'Creative illustrator in South France'
Is a much better title than:
'Illustrator'

Which doesn't give either search engines or potential clients sufficient information about that page.

If you have 2 Title fields, then it means I've installed a module allowing you separate Titles, as follows:

The 1st Title field is the H1 Title that appears on the page itself.
The 2nd Title field is the metatag Title that appears with search engines.

MENU SETTINGS

Clicking Menu Settings then presents the following options:

Menu Link Title - What do you want the links TO this page, from other pages on your site to be called?  (Fairly short Link Titles often work best, but should still be descriptive).

Parent Item - Where does this link appear on your site?  The default is normally Primary Links, which is your main set of links, but you may have more than one set of links on your site.  If you wish this page to be linked to as a sub-menu item from another page, select the relevant page it's a sub-menu of.

Weight - Determines the order of links, ignore this for now, as there are easier ways of ordering links.

BODY

This determines the main content of a given page and uses the intuitive Drupal FCK Editor interface, which is much like Word.

To insert an image in the Body, use the Image Assist button:

From an SEO perspective, it's useful to use the words in the Title a few times in the Body section of the page (not necessarily in the same order).  This should happen naturally, after all the Title is what this page is about!

If you've specified that you want 2 separate editable blocks on every single page, you will also have a Side Content section, which is the equivalent of a 2nd Body field.

META TAGS

Meta tags provide information about each page to search engines.

Description - This is a synopsis of the page (In the example used above, it starts 'Original website design with free hosting ...'

Google won't place your site higher or lower based on the Description, so use the Description to sell yourself to people looking at a list of search results.  The Description should encourage visitors to click your site, rather than someone else's.

Do not just put a list of keywords in here, that's what the Keyword field is for!

Keywords - Each page will have different keywords that you'd like it to appear with search engines for.  This field should list keywords (or more aptly, key phrases) separated by commas. 

Some pointers:

• It's OK to repeat a keyword one or two times if it's as part of a phrase (e.g. 'Drupal website design' is different to 'creative website design'), but don't repeat any exact keyword more than once (e.g. Drupal, Drupal, ...) as this will likely encourage search engines to ignore your Keywords.
• Any keyword should also appear in the Body of your page at least once.
• Your site can have generic keywords added to every page, if you'd like this, let me know, but I suggest keeping this down to 2 or 3 key phrases that will be relevant to every single page of your site (or the vast majority).

 
URL PATH SETTINGS

I create sites with the Pathauto module enabled, so if you leave this blank, by default the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) will match the title.  The URL of this page for example is:

drupal-end-user-guide

Which forms part of the overall address of this page:

http://www.1websitedesigner.com/drupal-end-user-guide

To modify it, untick the 'Automatic Alias' box, then change it.  If you do this, make sure that other pages (or other websites) linking to this page are updated.

PUBLISHING OPTIONS

If you're working on a page, but don't finish it in one go, click to expand 'Publishing Options', then untick 'Published'.  This will mean that only site administrators will be able to see this page.

To publish the page once you have finished it, simply tick 'Published' again.

SAVE

This is the most important button on the Create Content page - remember to press 'Save' once you've finished creating or editing a page!

Alternatively, press 'Preview', which shows you what the page looks like, then scroll down to the bottom and press 'Save'.

For sites in development, I prefer to use 'Save', then check the page after it's saved.

This Drupal end-user guide was written by Martin Woods of 1 Website Designer.  We hope it's been useful!