Commenting is one of the best things that you can do for your church website and for those who take on the mantle of web aficionado when you are ready to pass it on.
In this context, commenting is all about putting short notes into your web pages to help guide new volunteers or just to help you remember how you did something in a prior fit of creativity.
The beauty of these comments is that they are completely invisible to website visitors but very clearly identifiable to website administrators once they’ve logged on to the site.
Why is commenting a good thing?
Well imagine if you had a page or a feature like Movie Nights that run in the summer. You’ve spent a good deal of time setting up the page so it looks exactly as you had envisioned. Now the Movie Nights are over, but you don’t want to delete the page or forget what you did to get the spacing or colors just right. And you know that the Movie Nights will happen again next summer.
Commenting allows you to put notes directly into the page right at the place where they would be most helpful.
How is commenting done?
It’s actually quite simple in WordPress or on any page that has text on it. Here are the steps:
1. Log on to the website
2. Go to the page where you would like to enter the comments
3. Go to the specific place on the page where you want to comment
4. Press enter so you begin on a new line
5. Type “<!-- ” (Ignore the quotes when actually typing this in)
6. Type your comment – it can be as long as you like
7. To end the comment type “-->” (again ignore the quotation signs)
8. Update the page
9. View the page – it should look no different than it did before you added your comments
A typical example would look like this:
<!-- This is a new comment -->
If your comment flows over multiple lines then it should look like this:
<!-- Here is the first line of my comment
Here is the second line
Here is the third line
-->
Why is commenting possible?
The quick answer is that web pages consist of text and code called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). In WordPress, you don’t tend to see all the HTML when you are editing a page. It`s generated on the fly as the page appears in a browser.
The “<!-- ” is an HTML command that basically says to the browser “Ignore everything that`s typed from here until you get to the “-->” command.
Give it a try, you may find yourself addicted to adding notes into your web pages!
Note: For this to work you must be in the Text editor version of a WordPress page not the Visual Editor. Commenting characters in Visual Editor are displayed just like any other character.
Please let me know in the comments below if you’ve found this post useful (or not) and if you have any follow up questions.
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