5 things to remember whenever you add content to the web

I regularly get calls from clients who have updated their websites only to find that the formatting is playing up and they are spending hours trying to get it right.

Here are 5 rules to keep in mind any time you add anything to your website CMS or the web in general.

  1. Never copy and paste directly from Word, if you have content in Word use the “Paste as plain text button” or the “Paste from Word” or just paste it into notepad first then into the site – this will strip all of Word’s terrible code.
  2. If the formatting ever breaks, copy the content out into notepad, turn on the HTML code view and delete all of the code so you have a clean slate. Then go back to normal view and paste the content back from notepad into the normal view. Sometimes code just gets corrupted (often because you have pasted from Word) and it can’t easily be fixed, you just have to start again.
  3. Don’t ever change the font size or colour. It is the job of your website’s stylesheet to manage font sizes. If you find yourself changing them there is something wrong with your template. Either that or you are addicted to using multiple colours and your site will end up looking terrible. You should just change the style – i.e. ‘Heading 1′ ‘Heading 2′ etc. Changing font sizes will often break stuff within a web editor.
  4. Don’t worry too much about how it looks in the editor itself, use it as a guide only and test it in the front end of the site and make sure it looks good there. Sometimes the back-end editors won’t include the same styles that are included on the live website so they should be used as a guide only.
  5. If you get stuck just call your web developer, it will always be easy for them to fix the code via code view.

Happy content creation!

November 3, 2011 at 3:04 am | CMS | Tagged with: , , , , | No comment