Last week we showed you how to use Jotter site to send email updates to parents. This week we’ll be covering how you can use Site to upload and disseminate newsletters.
As with last week, you’re going to want to go into Edit mode then click Manage, but this time we’re going into News.

Clicking it will bring up the dialogue box below – it’s empty by default, but I pre-populated mine with some content a few months back. The two big options are Add News and News Categories. The former is for content, the latter for organisation, we’ll deal with the latter first, to give us a nice framework.

Categories are handy both for organising your content in the backend, and also for specifying feeds later on. Adding them is just a matter of clicking News Categories, then clicking Add News Category to get the following view. Fill it out with relevant information (for example, you might want a category for sporting achievements, or for upcoming school trips).

We can now go back to the main news dialogue and click Add News to begin crafting our news item.

Here’s a brief overview of each section:

• Category: The category you specified earlier
• Title: What you want the title of your post to be
• Description: Flavour text, displayed as an overview of the story
• Content: The main body, where your news item will go
• Image: If you want to illustrate your story, you can attach an image

When you’re done, click Add News. Now you need somewhere to publish it. Go to the page you’d like to insert your news feed on and, in Edit mode, click Insert Item, then News.

By default, the box you put in will automatically display the five most recent news items you’ve created, including their titles and descriptions. Clicking on the news box while in edit mode will bring up the following bar at the top of your page.

You can customise this box with the drop-down menus as follows:

• Type: Whether you want the news box to be active or archived – if you have a dedicated news page, you might wish to display news from the past with less information.
• Category: The category you created earlier – by default it will pull through all news
• Image: Whether or not the articles have images next to them
• Articles: How many pieces of news will display by default
• Pagination: On dedicated news websites, setting this to “on” will automatically load new pages when you reach the bottom of the current one

As you can see, you can customise this to look pretty much any way you like!
Want tips like this one delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up to our Jotter Tips mailing list here!

Parents want to know what’s happening at your school – what’s the best way to tell them? In the past it was crumpled sheets of A4 hastily stuffed into folders and rucksacks, to hopefully be handed to parents a few weeks later. Luckily, your website lets you manage this in a much easier way. Two ways, in fact! This week we’ll be looking at email newsletters, and next week we’ll cover news items.

Part One: Newsletters

Newsletters are emails you can send out to your subscriber list. Setting them up couldn’t be simpler either.
First, you’re going to want to create some Newsletters in your Jotter Site backend. Log in, visit your homepage and click on the Manage tab, then click “Newsletters”.

You’ll see the following screen, showing a list of any emails you might have created – by default though, this will be blank. You’ll notice two options at the top: Add Newsletter and Subscriptions.

First, we’ll look at the subscriptions area, this is where you manage who the emails will go to.

We’ll go through the buttons at the top in order now:

• Add subscription – Allows you to manually input a username and email
• Download spreadsheet – Lets you export your subscribers to a CSV file
• Import spreadsheet – Lets you import a CSV of names and email addresses

Additionally, you can edit and unsubscribe individual addresses manually by using the Edit and Unsubscribe links to the right of each field.
Please note, you can only have the one address book, so we recommend using it for parents and interested parties.
Now we can go back and look at the Add Newsletter dialogue
To anyone who’s used an email client before, this should be pretty straightforward:

• Title: The subject line of the email you want to send
• Description: The text and content you’d like to include in the email
• Date: When you plan to send the email
• File attachment: Used for things like images or PDFs

Once that’s filled in and saved, all you need to do is click “Email to subscribers” on the main newsletter screen (the second image), and confirm you want to send it. And that’s it, you’re done! Next week, we’ll be showing you how to embed newsletters into your site, for a self-updating page.
Want to receive tips like this straight to your inbox? Sign up here! To read part two of this tutorial, click here.