Configuring site settings

Dashboard settings

Your site settings in the Dashboard are general settings that provide some customizations to writing style, media uploads, the admin bar, duplicated content, and SEO settings across your website. Making substantial or major changes in this section is not recommended. You can access these settings in the Dashboard by clicking Settings on the left sidebar and choosing the settings that you would like to adjust from the menu. Please note: These are all standard WordPress settings, and not settings provided for layout or formatting for HarvardSites.

Please use the Appearance > Customize settings to change these settings and see a live preview of your settings changes.

• General: This is where you can adjust your site title, tagline, and populate your primary site administrator email address. You also can adjust the site language, timezone, and the format you would like dates to appear in on the site.
• Writing: You can adjust writing formats like converting emoticons to graphics on display and changing your default post category and format. 
• Reading: Provides you with the opportunity to change your site visibility and options for changing your homepage display
  • Site visibility: you can change your site visibility settings and determine if you would like search engines to crawl your site or make it not visible to search engines. 
  • Homepage display settings: This can be your latest posts or a static page that you choose. You can also change how many posts will be displayed on a page and how many show in a feed when a feed is used across the website.
• Media: You have the option to change your image and thumbnail sizes and enable image optimization for faster load times on the site. Default media settings are recommended for HarvardSites. 
• Admin Bar: Determine what types of users have permissions and access to the admin bar (top bar displayed on WordPress)
• Duplicate Post: When you plan to copy a post on the site, you can determine which elements of a post to copy, and which options should not be copied to a new page. 
• SMO: You can make changes to your Twitter (X) settings including how posts will be shared and how they will look on Twitter when they are shared from the site. 
• SEO: Provides you with the ability to determine which SEO fields should be displayed and filled out on individual posts, the homepage, pages, media, directory, etc. We recommend keeping the default settings enabled for SEO. 
• Accessibility: Allows you to add fallback alt tags for all images that don’t have alt text applied. We highly recommend that you write alt-text for each image on your website, and not apply these settings. 
• Disable Comments: Allow users to comment on certain post types or disable comments across the entire website. The default setting is to disable comments everywhere (recommended). Only enable comments for posts if you the ability to moderate.

Customizer settings

The Customizer allows you to configure your logo, visual styles, colors, footer settings, etc. When configuration changes are made, you will see them updated in real time in the preview window making it easier to visualize the changes that you are making to your content. 

There are two ways access the Customizer:

1. On the page view, select Customize at the top middle of your screen.
2. In the Dashboard, navigate on the left sidebar to Appearance > Customize.

A new menu will appear on the left sidebar with different visual styles that you can choose from. Please note the site name that you are customizing to make sure you have the right site selected, and that you are making edits to the active theme called “HarvardSites”.

Site appearance

This panel allows you to adjust the favicon or site icon that shows in the public browser tab for your website. This could be the standard Harvard favicon or a different one that you upload. 

Site header

This section allows you to adjust your site’s header including your site title, logo, and how it is displayed.

• Site name:
  • Site name: The title of your website. 
  • Site subname: This could be the department or unit that the site lives within, or a tagline for the site.
• Style:
  • Site header layout: You have the option for the navigation header to appear inline with the logo and global header information, or stacked vertically below the global header information with a different color or variation. This can help distinguish these two elements if you have a lot of information between them. 
  • Site name display: You have the option to only show the logo in the header, or remove the logo and only should the site name and sub-name that is added to the site identity settings. 
• Logo:
  • Logo and Mobile Logo: You have the option to upload a logo for your site, and optionally a different logo for the mobile view
  • Logo Height: Use the up/down arrows or add an exact logo height in pixels that you would like your logo to be displayed on for desktop devices. 

Site footer

You have the option of adding your logo or just the site name/sub-name to the footer of the site along with adding an important blurb and social media icons to every page in your footer.

• Site name: This is the site name and subname which will appear in the footer. It could optionally be different than in the header
• Style:
  • Footer layout: You have the option for the footer menu to appear stacked vertically below the site name and details, or side-by-side in columns.
  • Site name display: You have the ability to show the logo or the site name/subtitle on the site. 
• Logo:
  • Logo: If you choose to display the logo, you have the option to upload a logo to add to the footer. 
  • Logo height: The height of the logo to be displayed on the footer of the site. 
• Footer content:
  • Blurb: A short few sentences about your department and what users are expecting to find on your website. 
  • Address: The address where users can find your department or unit
  • Phone: A main phone number for the department/unit
  • Email: The main email address that users can contact you at
  • Site-Specific Privacy Policy: If needed, add a site-specific privacy policy link for your group. Some sites collect further information from their users for marketing purposes and may need a site-specific privacy policy. Please seek out more guidance on privacy policies.
• Social links: There are fields for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Tiktok, etc. for the social channels that you want to display on your site.

Menus

You have the ability to edit your footer, header, sidebar and utility menus from the menus options. Please see how-to documentation on menus. 

Content

Allows you to determine the data elements to be associated with posts on the site like author, publication date, categories and tags. 

Homepage Settings

Your homepage can be a list of your most recent posts or a static page that you can select from the dropdown menu.