Website Administration
Website Administration
The purpose of Website Administration is to provide guidelines for managing and maintaining the Water Gardens Google Sites website.
This website provides a display platform for current and future events via the Google Calendar. A website is the ONLY WAY that the community's Google Calendar can be shared with residents online. This is essential to those who would like to reserve the Community Center in future months.
The Water Gardens website provides resources of use and interest to Water Gardens residents, such as the Master Resident Directory, community Rules and Regulations, community Map, Newsletters, and other items of use or interest.
The Water Gardens website also houses an extensive library of technical manuals for administering the technical and infrastructure needs of Water Gardens.
Click on the links below to go to administration pages for the specific third party program.
NameSilo Administration - Domain Name registration, ie, the domain = "watergardens55.org" is purchased here. The bill of about $15/year must be paid to keep our domain name.
AuthPro Administration - Provides role-based access control for the Water Gardens website by providing private logins. The bill of about $50/year must be paid to keep our private login security system.
The Water Gardens website is targeted to the following audiences
Residents - The website provides information to the residents of the community.
Prospective Residents - The website provides information of use to those who are considering moving into our community.
Administrators - The website contains a library of technical manuals to assist in the administration of the technical and infrastructure needs of our community.
The website is located at https://www.watergardens55.org. Residents can also log into the Private Access portions of the website.
Regular residents will be directed to a Private Access page which gives them access to the Master Resident Directory, and to other private information such as articles and images about Water Gardens activities and events.
Administrators will also be given access to the library of technical manuals.
The public can navigate all aspects of the Public Menu. They do not have access to the Private Access portions of the website.
The regular residents can navigate all aspects of the Public Menu, and all aspects of the Private Access Menu for residents.
Administrators can navigate all aspects of the Public Menu, and all aspects of the Private Access menu for administrators.
It is very easy to create and edit pages in Google Sites. If you have any familiarity with Google products, you will be right at home. Remember, when you create a "page", you are also creating a Menu Item. See section 3.4 below for more on menus/navigation.
It is recommended to put a Title at the top of each page. Enter the title, change the properties from "Normal text" to "Title", and then change the color of the Title to green. Select the 2nd from the bottom green color in the color section box. Then continue to build out the page as needs require.
Google Sites web pages can incorporate virtually all the products in the Google business suite. You can embed or link to Google Docs, Sheets, Forms, Blogs, Drawings and Photos. Be aware that Forms are on the wgforms55@gmail.com account, not this main account. That is because if Google decides our forms are "spam", they can shut the forms down without warning. We don't want that to happen to our main Google site!
It is very straightforward to create a Public Menu item. Simple add a page, determine where you want it to reside on the Public Menu, which is the visible to navigation menu. Just simply remember, the Page name is also the Menu Item name!
It is more complicate to create a Private Access page. We don't use the built in Menuing system, but we use the Private Access menu pages, and we create our own menu on those pages. This is to keep private pages, private.
Create a private page, hide it from navigation, and on the New Page dialog box, click "Advanced" and give the page a very long totally random name, consisting of upper and lower case letters and numbers. This is to make remembering the URL difficult.
Then create and configure the page as you wish. Then publish it.
Once published, click on the "Link" icon at the top of the page titled "Copy published site link".
Then go to the Private Access page, and create a "link" on that page to the newly created page. Paste the link that you copied in the previous step, into that link.
In essence you are creating a separate menu system on the Private Access pages. If the private page is for regular residents, then put the link on the Private Access page for regular residents. If the private page is for administrators, then put the link on the Private Access page for administrators.
Publish your changes. It is always wise to test your new links, to be sure they work the way you expect.
If you were to create a new website, you would need to experiment with Themes until you have the look and feel you want. For the greatest control, create a Custom Theme. You can select the color palette and fonts that you desire.
To change the menu color.
First of all, you need to create a "Custom Theme". Just give your theme a name, and select a color palette. No matter what you select, the menu will be black.
THEN in the edit mode on the theme, go down to Navigation. Find the bit that says "Color when Scrolled". Whatever color you select there becomes your menu color. There is a very very wide range of colors, so you ought to be able to get it exactly the way you want :).
Guidelines for maintaining a consistent visual style throughout the website.
I usually delete the existing "Header" and put a Title at the top of each page. I configure it as "Title", center it, and give it a standard font color.
There are three user roles on the website: Public, Regular Resident and Administrator.
Public - The Public user can only view public content. They will not be granted private access.
URL: https://www.watergardens55.org
Regular Resident - The Regular Resident user can view public content, and limited private access content, to include the Master Resident Directory, and various slide shows and community interest articles containing images of residents.
URL: https://www.watergardens55.org/IJ82lZZiparazzilPPKRLrlw330slwj4jqi3lla3qauzrpw2305pww
Administrator - The Administrator can view the public content, and all of the private access content, including that which the Regular Resident may see, and also including library of Technical Manuals describing how to administer various technical aspects of the community, such as this manual.
URL: https://www.watergardens55.org/E88aajfoefaefjcas-i33383as3saafrasli33ia29388ah3
The website is published online, viewable by the world, at the address, "watergardens55.org". This website has been up and running since 2007, and is easily found with a Google search.
The website is designed to work well on computers, tablets and smartphones.
Security - The website is based on Google Sites, which is a very secure place to have websites. Google rarely gets attacked, and is very safe.
Access Control - Access to the private content on the Water Gardens website is controlled by the services of a third party, "Authpro.com", which Water Gardens pays for. This third party provides a login service that will automatically direct the Regular Residents to the Private Access menu for Regular Residents, and the Administrators to the Private Access menu for Administrators.
Recommended maintenance tasks, such as updating content, fixing broken links, and backing up the site.
How to identify and resolve common website problems.
Procedures for reporting issues to the IT support team.
Definitions of key terms used in the manual.
Additional troubleshooting advice and solutions.
Links to helpful Google Sites resources and tutorials.
https://www.Namesilo.com