LAKEKIT NEWS June 2018

Welcome to the new Lakekit!

Hello Lakekit users! As you’ve probably heard, Lakekit is now a program of Wisconsin Lakes. We hope to bring more resources, more tools, and more sites on board in the coming years as part of our strategy to help build your organization’s communications capacity and foster better information sharing between lake organizations around the state.

In the coming months you’ll be seeing many different kinds of changes:

• Cosmetic – For instance, take a look at the new lakekit.net, if you haven’t seen it yet!
• Technical – Slowly we’ll be migrating all of you to a new WordPress editor, Elementor Pro, a “drag and drop” editor that will allow you to manage more of the content and the look of your site with even less hassles (see the story on Elementor Pro, below)
• New tools – We plan on developing interactive plugins that you’ll be able to use in your site, such as a “Lake News” news feed that could automatically include news and info from Wisconsin Lakes, your own content, and possibly even content from other Lakekit member sites!

But the biggest goal for Lakekit is that it becomes a true community effort. While we have the strong professional backing of Northern Graphics Operations (NGOps), our aim is to build a community around the network where most problems are solved by the knowledge and experience of other users, and to do so we’ll be building a library of problems and their solutions, offering trainings and volunteer opportunities to those who wish to pitch in with a little extra help, and developing communication vehicles to get information out (for now, I encourage you to check out the Lakekit Talk Facebook group).

The Lakekit program is overseen by a Steering Committee that includes myself, volunteers Larry Bresina (the “Father of Lakekit”!) and Karen Reynolds, and Ken Justiniano from NGOps. Look for these news and info briefs to resume a monthly schedule, and don’t hesitate to contact me or any of us with any questions or comments at any time.

We’re excited to be on board. Talk to you again in July!

Mike Engleson
Executive Director
Wisconsin Lakes

Elementor Pro – Meet the new editor

All new sites are currently being designed using the Elementor Pro WordPress editor and eventually we’ll be asking all member sites to make the conversion. Don’t worry, we’ll provide you with lots of technical assistance and NGOps will handle the actual transition of the site for you as part of your membership. We’re still working out the process for this transition, and don’t plan on pushing anyone to the new system until you’re ready.

But there’s reason to be excited about the transfer! Elementor is a powerful editor that uses a simple drag and drop format and comes with a ton of features. For instance – not happy with your current header? Now you’ll be able to edit it’s look and content right from within Elementor. Buttons, headlines, forms? All are available “widgets” and most everything is doable with knowing how to code!

We’ll be talking more about specific Elementor features in future newsletters, but for now, check it out at https://elementor.com/pro/. (And don’t fret about the pricing – use of Elementor Pro will be included in your membership fee).