'Add New Content'

 Adding content is the core in any Content Management System. Keep your content current and updated, and you will find Search engines, and users, going to your site a lot more. When you click "Add New Content", you are given some powerful options to add new Pages to your Website.

Content Type

This can be a few options, but these are the most used:

'Content' - A normal page with text an images (Content!)

'Internal Page Link' - A link on the main menu that will go to another page on your own site, selected from a list.

'External Link' - A link on the main menu that will go to another page on another site

To find out how to create links on a content page and not in the menu, click here

 

Title

This is the title of the page. Depending on your site design, this may or may not appear on the page.

Menu Text

This is the text that will appear on the menu. It's best to keep this short.

Parent

A parent page is the main page on the site. Selecting a parent page makes the page you are editing the child. Depending on how your site is designed, either the page will be become invisible or will appear inside the page you have selected.

For example, you have a page called "Events" > This is the Parent Page.

You then want a few pages inside Events, called "Birthdays" and "Weddings" > These are children pages.

You would select "2. Events" in the parent dropdown on the Birthdays and Weddings pages.

Weddings and Birthdays will now appear inside the Events page as a link. Depending on your site, they may also appear as a dropdown or a clickable list.

Template

This is an important selection. Depending on your site, you may have many templates to be selected. The Template dropdown may also be in the options tab. A template will 'skin' the page you are about to type out. For example:

You might have "Main Page", "Sub Page" and "Package Page".

Depending on the content you are about to create, you would select the right one. Making a page that is inside another page? (A child?) Then you would select a Sub Page Template. Are you making a page to sell something? Then you would select a "Package Page" Template.

 

  • Does something look messed up on your site? No worries! Editing the page will give you the chance to change these options again.

 

Fig 1. The Content Editing Window

Adding Content

Using the bar shown in Fig 1, you can add and style your content. Your site will handle most of the design by itself, but here you can change text colour, size, add images in the page and more. Most of the options from a word processor are present here, and the buttons should be familiar. Here are a few tips when adding content:

  1. There are 3 Paste options: 'Paste', 'Paste as plain text', and 'Paste from Word' but what one to use? Keep this in mind - Word formatting does not work well with the internet. Using the 'Paste from word' button will help keep your content looking nice in the conversion. Pasting as plain text works well when you are coping from another site or a strange source. It will strip all formatting and paste just the text. Regular pasting works best from a web editing program or copying text from other pages on your CMS site.
     
  2. Fonts and Styles: They do work, but your site has been setup not to need this. Add fonts when you need something styled just a little nicer then regular text, but don't change the font on every page.
     
  3. The Source Button: This is a great tool to swap from regular editing to code. It looks scary, I know, but adding custom codes you get from the internet using this button will work perfectly.
     
  4. Experiment! Make a new page and play with it, use the tables buttons, page formatting and highlighting, add some pictures and don't be worried about messing something up. You can always delete the page and start again, and you will feel more confident about making pages!

 

Managing Photos in the Content Window

This is the button you'll be using to add a photo. It should look similar to this anyway.

It will bring you to this window:

From here, you have a few options:

"Browse Server" - If you have already uploaded a picture, you can click this button and find it on the list. Click it and press ok to put it's URL in the box automatically.

"Upload" Tab - Use this to add a new picture to the server. Click the browse button to find the photo on your computer, disc or flash drive, then press ok. Clicking 'Send it to the Server' will upload it. when the upload is complete, it will automatically add itself to the 'Image Info' tab.

Width, Height and border can be selected here. The greater the number, the thicker the border on your image will be.

 

Modifying An Image on the Page

In the image above, we can see white squares on the edges of the image. Similar to Word, you can click and drag these to change the size of the image. Scaling the image this way is quick, but may look rough on some browsers. It's recommended to change the size of the image in the 'Image Manager' and save it there first.

Right clicking on the image will bring up a context menu with a few options. Clicking 'Image properties' allows you to change the image and the border again.