Your site will have lots and lots of Web pages, with great writing and great photography, managed by a wide variety of stakeholders around your campus community.  It may be a complete departure from your current site; it may be a “reskinning” of the site you’ve already got; or the look of your site may not change at all.

A CMS implementation can seem like a big job, but it doesn’t have to be.  Here are some simple things you can do when you’re first setting up LiveWhale on your campus.

Get to know your configuration files.

LiveWhale’s config files (for front end content and back end administrative functions) allow you to customize some of the details of your CMS’s operations; in general, they’re just good to be familiar with.  (They include things like default thumbnails

If you don’t know what a config file is, forget we said that!

Start gathering photography.

It’s never too early to start collecting photography from your community.

Get to know this default theme.

If you’re going to be building your site based on this starter framework, you should get a sense of how this page is laid out.  The framework we use is a reduced version of the Twitter Bootstrap framework, based on a six-column grid with CSS rows and span.  You can use your own CSS and templates entirely— and if you’ve already got a buildout with CSS and HTML, that’s what you’ll want to do.  But if you’re building from scratch, consider using this vanilla template as a launching pad.

Get to know the Admin Tools.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a LiveWhale admin. (Hi!)  There’s a set of links in the upper left corner of the back end site just for you. You’ll use them a lot, so let’s get into more detail about them…

Next:  Admin Tools