(Before you read: we recommend viewing this article on a computer)
KidMag has reached a major milestone. Since September 7th, 2018, KidMag has published ninety-nine articles, which means that…
This is KidMag’s 100th article!
In celebration of this, we decided to give you a backstage tour of how KidMag works. We’ll show you a little bit about how we publish articles and how we design our site.
- The first step that we would take to publishing an article is to go to kidmag.ca. This is the simplest step.
- In the bottom right corner beside the “Follow” button, there are three dots. We click those dots, and a menu comes up. We click “Log in.”
- A new screen appears. We log in.
- This is where the fun part happens. Once we are into our account, it’s time to start writing the article! Once we have logged in, we are taken back to kidmag.ca, but we have a totally different view of the website. As you can see in the photo below, we have access to our stats, comments, and we have the ability to write an article!
- As you can see in the photo above, in the top right corner there is a button that says “Write”. We click that button and a new screen appears. This is where we can start writing! When we are finished writing the article, it’s time to move on to the next step.
This is how a written KidMag article looks before it is published:
- The first thing that we do when we are done writing an article is to set the category. To do this, we click the button that says “Categories and Tags”. A menu will appear below that, which is a list of the categories that KidMag has. (A category is where the article will appear on KidMag. For example, our Mug Cake article appears under the category “Recipes”. These are all of KidMag’s categories:
Like we said before, to categorize an article, we click on the button that says “Categories and Tags”. A menu appears underneath it. These are all of the categories that we can choose to categorize the article in. We choose a category, and the article is categorized!
- After we categorize the article, we choose the featured image. This is the image that appears behind the title of the article, like this one:
To choose a featured image, we click on the button that says “Featured Image”.
Then we click on the button that appears within that, that says, “Set Featured Image”. It opens up all of KidMag’s photos and there are so many photos to choose from!
When we find a photo that we are happy with, we click on it and it is set to be our featured image! Time to set up our excerpt… - The next step, as you might have guessed, is to set up our excerpt. This is a short description of the article we have just written.
To do this, we click on the button that says “More Options.”
We write the excerpt. We are almost ready to publish!
- But wait! Before we publish an article, we have to edit it! Typically a person and two different kinds of computerized editing programs go over our work for spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors.
- And… finally, it is time to publish! To publish the article, we simply click the giant pink publish button that you can see in many of the photos above. When that is done, we make sure that an email is sent to our followers about the article we just posted, and we double check that there is nothing wrong with the quality of the photos on the article.
Now that you have seen how we publish an article, we’ll show you a little bit about how we design the website.
As you can see in the photo below, we can see how many people come to our site every day, where that viewer is from, and what article they looked at (Stats). We can see how many articles we have posted so far (99!) and there is so much more we can do. But, we decided to show you how we design our site: we start by clicking the button that says “Customize”, as you can see in the photo below.
When you click customize, a new screen appears! As you can see in the photo below, there are many things that we have to do to design our website. But because there are so many, we decided to show you just a little bit about how we design KidMag.
KidMag’s main image, home screen and colours! Currently, it is a galaxy, but that is subject to change very, very soon for a fresh new look! The main image is technically called a header image, and we are going to show you how we would change that. The first, most obvious thing would be to click the button that says “Header Image.”
Once you click on that button, there are many things you can do. You can change the header image of course, but we can do many things, like change the colours of KidMag and change the image that appears when you scroll down really fast. (Currently, it is the word “KidMag” in rainbow letters. Not sure what we are talking about? Go back to KidMag’s home page and scroll down really fast. You’ll notice that the word “KidMag” will appear in rainbow letters while it loads.)
Although there is so much more that we could show you, we could only show you the most important parts otherwise it would be such a long article! We just can’t show you everything! However, you can always use our contact page to ask us any questions you may have about KidMag. You can ask us anything you want about how KidMag works!
