Most websites these days are built with a Content Management System or CMS to allow the site owner to "easily" manage the content and images of his/her website. You noticed I placed "easily" in quotation marks, because in my experience that is not always the case; unless you know the tricks of the trade.
Here is my list of the Top 10 Tricks for Editing Content with a CMS:
1) Never paste your text directly from a word editor such as and in particular Microsoft Word. Always, always, paste the text into Notepad first (to strip out all formatting) and then cut and paste into your CMS's HTML editor. Yes, you may need to do some formatting again, but it will be much easier to format from scratch than to try to fix formatting issues that came over from your Word document.
2) In most HTML editors the paragraph return (two line spaces) is hitting the Enter/Return key on you computer, a line return (single line space) is holding your Shift key down why pressing the Enter/Return key.
3) Don't do like I was taught in school and add two spaces between sentences. That causes your HTML editor to place a hard space ( ) which can cause major formatting issues, especially when you are editing text in a small area; like a call-out box or thin column.
4) After you input your text, click on the Edit HTML or Source button on your HTML editor's menu to see the actual HTML code. Just look for any odd characters or code that don't seem to belong there. Cut the code out, then go back to your regular view and see if your text layout still looks fine, if so, that was the correct decision. If not, go back to the Edit HTML view and paste the code back in.
5) When inserting images, make sure you size the image first before placing it onto the page. Yes you can "scale" the photo, but let's say you added five photos to the page you are working on, each photo is a huge 1500x1500 pixel image that you scaled to only 200x200. Your site visitor still has to download five huge photos when accessing that page, even though they only appear as smaller photos on the page.
6) Make sure your CMS's HTML editor has a spell check tool built into it, and then use it always.
7) Whenever you add a link for some text or an image, click on the "Target" option if you have the ability, and then click on "New Window". This keeps your current page active for the site visitor while opening up a new browser window for the new link.
8) Use Tables! The tables tool in the HTML editor is your best friend. It is by far the easiest and cleanest way to format your text and imagery on a page when you want to do more than just write a couple of paragraphs. It's very handy for doing pages like Bios and Portfolios, etc..
9) If your CMS allows you to input the Meta and Alt tag data, do it. Don't get lazy. Spend that extra few minutes to create or update these tags so that the search engines will better understand your website for ranking purposes.
10) Make sure your website has been designed with style sheets (CSS), and integrate those into your HTML editor. So when you want to add a paragraph title for example, that font formatting should already be set and just a drop down menu click away for you. This will also keep your website consistent from page to page and from editor to editor.
Please contact Ken Sabey by phone (303.506.3406), email (ken@webptoh.com) or feel free visit my website at www.WebptOh.com.
