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1.Startup & Overview   2.Editing Text   3.Editing Photos   4.Formatting

Section 4: Formatting Using the Icon Toolbar

The toolbar allows you to perform more advanced tasks such as inserting images, links etc. An example toolbar is shown below.

Tool Bar

What the buttons do

icon Cut  
icon Copy  
icon Paste  
icon Paste as plain text Formatting such as bold, italic, fonts & sizes are usually preserved when pasting text. Use this button to paste text without such formatting.
icon Paste from Word Special options for pasting text from Microsoft Word.
icon Undo
icon Redo
icon Find Search for text in the page
icon Replace Replace some text with some other text
icon Remove Format Remove formatting from selected text. This can be very useful when pasting text from a formatted source. Also useful for resetting things when it all goes crazy (it happens, unfortunately).
icon Bold  
icon Italic  
icon Underline  
icon Insert/Remove Numbered List Click to change the current paragraph into the first item of a numbered list. Click again to change the current list item into a normal paragraph.
icon Insert/Remove Unordered List As above, except for bulleted lists.
icon Decrease Indent  
icon Increase Indent Indent current paragraph. If used when the cursor is in a list it turns the list into a sub list.
icon Left Text Align
icon Center Text Align
icon Right Text Align
icon Justify Text Align
icon Source Displays the HTML source of the current page. Very useful if you understand HTML, utterly bewildering if you don't!
icon Insert/Edit Site Link Insert a link to another page on the current site. (Only those pages on your site enabled for WebSite 2.0).
icon Insert/Edit Link Insert a link. See separate section below for full details.
icon Remove Link Removes the currently selected link.
icon Insert/Edit Image Insert a image. See separate section below for full details.
icon Insert Special Character Format Insert accented and other special characters that are not available on a standard keyboard.
Format   Set the format of the current paragraph. See separate section below for full details.
Size   Set the size of the selected text. Use Format instead.
icon Text Color Set the color of the selected text. Use sparingly.

Inserting links

First highlight the text that you wish to turn into a link (the 'clickable' bit). Next click the Link button on the editor toolbar which will make a small window pop up. You now have several choices depending on what kind of link you wish to create:

When you have finished click 'OK' and your link should appear in the text. Remember that you need to select the text to turn into a link before creating the link itself.

Using the Format drop-down

It is very important to use this. Normal text should use the 'Normal' format and headings should always be set using the 'Heading 1', 'Heading 2' etc. formats rather than the Font size and Bold, Italic, Color etc. buttons. There are several reasons for this:

1. Improves consistency throughout the site since all headings look the same.

2. Improves search engine ranking since the search engine understands the document structure better.

3. Improves accessibility since sight impaired users can listen to a list of headers in the current page and skip straight to the relevant section.

4. Allows the webmaster to change the style of every heading throughout the site in one place using stylesheets.

Saving your changes

Below the content area are four buttons:

Inserting images

Place the cursor where you wish for the image to appear. Next click the Image button on the editor toolbar which will make a small window pop up. You now have several choices depending on where the image that you wish to insert is currently stored:

It's a good idea to type something descriptive into the Alternative Text box as this will make the image more meaningful to search engines and sight impaired users.

You can change the width and height in pixels but note that this does not change the size of the image itself, only the size that it is displayed at. Changing the size in this way usually degrades image quality and is generally discouraged in favor of resizing the image in an image manipulation program prior to uploading it.

You may also set values for an image border and horizontal & vertical spacing. Finally you can set an Alignment to alter the way text flows around the image.

Once you have finished click 'OK' and the image will appear in your page.

Was this helpful?  Do you have any suggestions for improvement?  Please take a minute and let us know.


Instructional content on this page was provided by Tamlyn Rhodes (www.zenology.co.uk) Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. RisingLine's WebSite 2.0 Content Management Solutions are modifications of CMS Made Simple and are distributed under the terms of the GNU/GPL license.

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