WordPress Template Guide

The Sauce Pot’s custom-built WordPress template is made specifically for bands and musicians to help get their sites up and running quickly. It includes templated pages for adding music, videos, photos, bio, tour dates, news, and press kit. Follow this guide to ensure you get the most out of your website. If you have any questions, concerns, or want to report a problem with your website, please email us.

Pages

New pages can be added by going to Pages in the left menu and clicking Add New. To choose from the several pre-made page templates, go to the Document column on the right side, open the Page Attributes section, and choose a template from the Template dropdown. Depending on which template you choose, different edit fields will appear in the main editing panel, and this will, in turn, ensure the page displays accordingly.

Home

Global content

Global elements are all edited from the home page. These elements include:

Artist name
Logo
Links
Font
Color scheme
Google Analytics tracking code
MailChimp newsletter shortcode

Home page content

The home page comes with several layout modules that can be customized and to make your home page unique. First is the Hero, which is the large background image that gets placed at the top of the home page. All of the other modules can be selected in Home Page Sections, and can be reordered around via drag and drop. Click the Add Section button and choose one of the following layout modules:

Featured Media
YouTube, Vimeo link, or Spotify embed.
Bandsintown
Lists your upcoming shows.
Featured Releases
Pulls up to three releases from the Music section.
Instagram Feed
Displays posts from your Instagram profile in a 3×3 grid.
Content
Basic WYSIWYG editor for text or general use. All text in this section gets centered automatically when displayed.
Image Grid
Displays linkable images in horizontal rows.

Music

Add releases

To add music releases, go to the Music menu item and click Add New. Enter the title of the release in the field at the top. Enter any information about the release in the content editor.

In the Player Embed Code field, paste in a music player embed code, either from Spotify, Bandcamp, or SoundCloud.

Add external links to other places your music can be found, such as iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, etc. in the Links section. Click Add Row and enter the link title in the Title field and the URL in the URL field. Links will automatically open in a new window. Repeat this process for each link.

To add artwork for the release, go to the Featured Image section in the right column and click Set featured image. Upload a file or choose one from your media library and click the Set featured image button.

Click Publish to publish your release.

Create a Music page

After you have published your releases, you will need to create a Music page for them to be displayed. To do this, go to Pages > Add New, enter “Music” as the page title, select the Music page template, and click Publish. No additional editing is required on this page.

Your releases will be ordered by the date in which you published them in WordPress. To reorder your music, go to the Music section, hover over one of the releases, click Quick Edit, and change the date. Note that this date does not need to be the same as when the music itself was published.

News

To create news articles, go to the Posts menu item, and click Add New. Enter a title, content, and an optional featured image, and click Publish. Repeat this process for each new article.

To create a news page, go to Pages > Add New, enter “News” as the title, select News as the page template, and click Publish. This page will automatically list all of your articles created in the Posts section.

Note that the three latest news items will automatically appear as snippets at the bottom of the home page.

Photos

To create a photos page, go to Pages > Add New, enter a title, and select Photos as the page template.

In the Images section, click Add Row and either upload a new image or select an image from your media library. Repeat this process for each photo.

When your photos are ready, click Publish.

Videos

To create a video page, go to Pages > Add New, enter a title, and select Videos as the page template.

In the Videos section, click Add Row and paste in a URL from YouTube in the YouTube URL field, and enter any additional content related to the video in the Description field. Repeat this process for each video.

When your videos are ready, click Publish.

Tour

The Tour page template is made to pull in your upcoming shows from Bandsintown. To do this, you will first need to get a widget embed code from Bandsintown.

Once you have your embed code, create a Tour page by going to Pages > Add New, enter a title, and select Tour as the page template. Paste in your widget embed code in the Bandsintown field.

When your tour page is ready, click Publish.

Press kit

It is very important to have a press kit page to have on your site. This page will allow industry professionals to easily get a snapshot of you or your band for booking or media purposes. The Sauce Pot template makes it easy to add your press information without having to worry about page design or layout.

To create a press kit page, go to Pages > Add New, enter “Press Kit” as the title, and select Press Kit as the page template. From there, you will see several sections and more detailed instructions for adding your press kit content.

When you are ready to publish your press kit, click Publish.

Other Pages

To create pages other than ones using the pre-built templates, simply follow the same steps as any other page to create one, and just make sure Default template is selected as the page template. Add your content into the content editor and click Publish.

Main menu

To edit the main menu, go to Appearance > Menus. There should already be a menu there, but you will need to manage it manually:

Change the Menu Name to “Main”
Add pages from the left column by clicking on their respective checkboxes and then click the Add to Menu button.
Add any custom links from the Custom Links section.
In the Menu Structure window, drag and drop to reorder menu items
Click the down arrow on each item to change the menu item title, if necessary
Make sure to not set any menu items at a sub-menu level
Click Save Menu

SEO

The Sauce Pot WordPress template utilizes the Yoast SEO plugin to improve search visibility and ranking on your site. However, it is not a “set it and forget it” kind of plugin. You will need to take some time to manage your content to ensure good search results.

On each page and post, you will see a Yoast SEO section. Be sure to fill out a minimum of the following fields:

Focus keyphrase
SEO title
Meta description

You will also need to edit general SEO information in the SEO menu item. In the Search Appearance sub-menu item > General tab, modify these fields:

Under Choose whether the site represents an organization or a person, select Organization
Under Organization, add the artist name in the Organization field and select the band logo in the Organization logo field

In the Social section, modify these fields:

In the Accounts tab, enter the URLs of your social media profiles.
In the Facebook tab, select an image in the Default settings > Image URL field. This image will appear when you share a page on Facebook and Twitter.

MailChimp

Your website comes with the ability to add a MailChimp newsletter signup field in the footer. To utilize this, go to the MC4WP menu item and enter your API Key and click Save Changes.

In the Form sub-menu item, create a new form called “Newsletter Signup,” and paste the following code in the Form Code field:

<input type="email" name="EMAIL" placeholder="Your email address" required />
<input type="submit" value="Sign up" />

Below that field, copy the shortcode, which should look something like this: [mc4wp_form id=”###”]. Go to Pages > Home > Global, and paste the shortcode in the Mailchimp for WP Shortcode field.