How to Post News to Your Home Page

If you have a home page news area, and you are having trouble posting news articles to it, then this guide will help.

1. Make Sure Your Design Theme Includes a Home Page News Area
   Most of the website design themes that we offer and build for our customers have a news area on the home page, so that you can post timely news articles to your home page.
   Some design themes, however, do not include a news area on the home page as part of the theme on purpose, so that the design can be very clean.
   It should be easy to tell if you have a news area looking at your home page. If you do not have an area for news to be posted to, and you would like one, please contact design at design@evogov.com.
2. Make Sure That You Have Access to Post News
   It is possible that you have access to the CMS, but you do not have access to post news articles. You should see the news button on the left hand side of your CMS.
   
3. Make Sure That Your News Categories are Created
   Before adding a news posting, you need to have categories that you can post to.
   You should have at least one News category for your website.
   Each department in your organization who will be posting news articles should also get their own news categories.
   When you make a news category, you can choose to have ALL of that category's news postings appear on the home page by checking the "show on home page" checkbox. We don't recommend this for all categories, as it is better to have a single category dedicated to the home page that is named "Home Page News".
   Each news category can be assigned to a department using the department drop-down selection. This will make it easier (in the near future) for departments to manage their own news postings.
   
   For municipalities, we typically see categories which contain the following choices:
   1. Home Page News
   2. City Council Meetings and News
   3. Mayor's News Announcements
   4. Bid Announcements
   5. Parks Department News
4. Make Sure Your Home News Category is Set to Puplish to Your Home Page
   As mentioned in number 3, make sure that your home page news category has the "show on home page" checkbox checked.
5. Make Sure You Have News Postings
   Make sure that you actually have news postings that are under the home news category.
6. Double-Check Your News Posting Date Fields
   Each news posting has a start and end date for when to show them. The dates (and times) entered into these fields are usually the reason why your news posts are not displaying on the home page.
   The START DATE must be in the past for the news article to show. One easy way to make sure this happens, is to choose yesterday's date for the start date when you post a new news item.
   The END DATE for a news posting is not required. With no end date, the news posting will show indefinitely. News postings that have an end date in the past will not be shown. Note that they also have the time of day on them as well.
7. Website Time Zone and Daylight Savings Pitfalls
   Sometimes (rarely, but it has happened), the news postings will have the correct start and end times, and yet they will still not appear on your home page. This is caused by the TIME ZONE setting for your website being set incorrectly. The time zone setting is in the hosting control panel that EvoGov.com staff members can see. It is not a setting in the CMS admin itself. This is because that time zone is used for many applications that power your website, that are run from the servers themselves.  DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME is not used by all of our customers. Arizona, USA and also some territories in Canada do not acknowledge daylight savings time. This can sometimes present a challenge when clocks are rolled back, but we can accommodate any time period in the software.  If you suspect that your time zone or daylight savings settings may be affecting your news postings, please use the live chat in the CMS to report this to our team.

Have a question or comment about this guide? Email support@evogov.com and we will reply promptly.