This article will teach you how to create a blog on your RevolutionParts site using Text Pages!
When first setting up a blog, you'll want to create a blog post FIRST before creating your actual blog page. That way, when you create your actual blog page, you have a blog post to link to. This will be explained in the second section of the article.
Creating a Blog Post
- First, log into your account on manage.revolutionparts.com.
- Then, click on the gear in the upper-right corner of the page to access the Account Settings.
- From the Account Settings page, click in the left-side menu on your store name, then "Design," then "Pages.
- Here, you'll see all of the Text Pages on your site. We'll use text pages to make the individual blog posts, and the main blog page itself. To add a new page, click the "+New Page" button in the upper-right corner.
- New Page Settings- On the page that loads, you'll see the fields for setting up a new page.
- Title- Give your blog post a title.
- URL- This will automatically update as you type the title, and will immediately follow your domain name when viewing the blog post.
- Page Type- Leave this at "Page."
- Published- Change to "Yes" whenever you're ready for the blog post to go live on your site.
- H1 Title- This is what your customers will see as the name of the tab in their web browser.
- Meta Title- Give your post a short title for Google to see (can be the same as the page title)
- Meta Description- Give your post a short description for Google to see (can be the same as the page title)
- Page Content- This is where the actual content of your blog post will go!
- You can type your blog post directly into the visual editor, switch to the HTML editor by clicking the "<>" button to edit the HTML code directly, or click the "Use Advanced Mode" checkbox to switch to the Page Builder.
- When you're ready to publish your post, click the "Save changes" button at the top-right corner of the page to publish your blog post to your site. It won't be immediately visible anywhere, though, which is where the next step comes in!
Creating/Modifying your Main Blog Page
PLEASE NOTE: the following section could be considered "advanced," as we will be using HTML code to build the main blog page containing the blog post links. If you are unfamiliar with HTML and need help inserting or understanding the code, please contact a member of your IT team or Marketing team for assistance.
It's time to set up the top-level "blog" page, which is where the actual posts will be listed.
- Start by creating a new text page similar to the one we created above. Name this one "Blog." Feel free to enter whatever you want in the page body field (some text, an image, anything), or leave it blank.
- To create the list of blog posts, you'll need to use HTML mode to edit the body field of the page. You can enable HTML mode by clicking the "<>" button above the text field under the "Page Content" header. You'll know you've entered HTML mode when the formatting buttons turn grey and become unclickable.
- While in HTML mode, copy and paste the code below into the text field to create your first blog post entry:
<!-- Begin blog post -->
If you are comfortable with HTML/CSS, feel free to edit the code above as desired. You are not required to use the above template.
<hr><div style="font-size: 24px; font-family: 'Open Sans'; padding-bottom: 8px;"><a href="blog-post-url">Blog Post Title</a></div>
<em style="padding-left: 15px;">Day-Month-Year</em> - Post Description
<br>
<!-- End blog post --> - Pasting the code above into the HTML section of the text page builder will give you a cleaner, more official look to your blog post list. If you are comfortable with HTML/CSS, feel free to modify the look and feel of the post as necessary.
- Once pasted, you'll need to modify some areas of the code to make it link to the blog post you created earlier. The pieces of information you need to ensure that you change are:
- blog-post-url - This is the post URL you'll need to copy from the post you created earlier. Make sure you copy the post's entire URL; the link won't work without it.
- Blog Post Title - This is the name/title of your post as it will appear on the blog page.
- Day-Month-Year - This is the date the post was written (or posted). This is optional, and you may format the date however you like.
- Post Description - This is a short, optional description of the contents of the post. Think of this as a subtitle or summary sentence.
- After changing the necessary contents of the code, click the HTML mode toggle button (the one that looks like this "<>") to switch back to the visual editor. Here, you'll see a version of the code you just implemented (due to styling applied to the live site, what you see in the builder isn't a perfect match of what will appear on the page itself).
- This is why we had to create a blog post first instead of the blog page: you need content to link to when creating the link!
- When you're finished adding your blog posts to your blog page, click the "Save Changes" button at the bottom to publish your page. The screenshot below is an example of what a blog page looks like using the format described above.
You can add as many blog posts as you like by copying and pasting the code for an existing blog post, then changing the code to be relevant to whatever the new post is.
PLEASE NOTE: After you've created your blog page, you'll need to contact RevolutionParts Support to have a link to your blog added to your site. Email your blog URL and a brief description of your preferred link location on the site to support@revolutionparts.com and we'll help you out!
Summary
To summarize, you need to create a blog post first before adding it to the "blog" page. After the post has been created, copy the code in this article (or from another existing post's HTML) to the blog page's HTML builder, and insert the necessary information from the blog post into the code. Save changes, and add as many blog posts as you like. Whenever you're ready, contact RevolutionParts Support to add a link to your blog.