the parish website scheme: adding and Editing
The Text Editor Box
The text box for entering event body text that we saw above is going to be used in a number of different places to allow you to add content to sections of your website, so it’s probably worth going through all the options that this offers here.
If you look at the diagram below, you’ll see that the editor allows you to use a number of standard word processing options like bold, italic, numbers, bullets, and so on. It also allows you to justify text left, right, or centered. Be aware that you should only ever center or right-justify very short pieces of text online, as this makes text very hard to read, and studies have shown that this is particularly the case for people who suffer from conditions like dyslexia.
Feel free to go ahead and experiment, but there are three options that you are likely to want to use and might need a little more explanation. These are: insert image, external link, and set text style, and we’ll now take a look at these.
The add picture option
In the text window, position the cursor where you would like to add your picture, and then click on the “insert image” button.
You should see a screen like the screenshot below. Click on the “upload image here” button to add an image.
Locate the image on your computer by using the “browse” button, and make sure that you give the image a title and a description.
Click “OK” to add the picture to your text. You can add as many pictures as you want to your text in this way.
Formatting the pictures
By default the system will add the pictures to your document at maximum size (400pixels wide), and inline with text. If you’d like to change the size of your pictures whilst editing your text, click once on the picture so it is selected (you can see when this happens by the black lines around the picture).
When the picture is selected, click on the “insert image” icon again. You’ll see the details you set earlier and the chance to change the alignment option.
If you want to change the size of the picture, then – as shown on the screenshot on the next page – you have a few options. The only option that you shouldn’t use is the “Large” setting – as this will be too big to fit into your webpage and will interfere with the formatting.
As a general rule, leave the size at 400 for full size pictures, or change them to 200 for half-width pictures that you want to flow to the left or right of text.
Removing a picture
If you want to remove a picture, then edit the text and select the picture by clicking once on it. The “Remove Image” icon will then appear – it’s a red X as shown in the screenshot below. Click on this to remove the image.
External Link
You can link to any other website, or webpage, with the address of that page (e.g. http://www.anotherwebpage.com). To add a link to your text, highlight the text you want to link, and press the “insert external link” button:
Then type in the address of the page you want to link to:
If you want to check that you’ve got the right page, then you can select “preview”, and the system will show you a picture of the page that you’ve specified.
When you’re happy that you’ve got the correct link, click on “OK” at the bottom right-hand corner (NB: you may need to scroll across to see this), and the link will be added to your text.
NOTE: there is also an “internal link” option, to the left of the “external link” option. In reality, the “external” link option we’ve used here is the quickest and simplest way to add links - whether to your website pages or someone else’s. That said, we’re not going to stop you from using “internal link” to link to a page you have recently created on your website.
Text styles
There are a number of additional styles that you can apply to text in the text box. To apply a style, highlight the text you want to change, and select the style from the text styles drop-down menu, as pictured:
The following screenshot shows what each of the text styles looks like when used:
Don’t over-use these text styles, but they do allow you some flexibility in the way that the text you add to your websites is displayed.
Now that you know how the text editor box works, you can continue to look at how to add items to your website by choosing one of the options on the left.