Adding text to your web site

This page guides you through adding text to your web site.

Topics:

Main editing screen

Once you've logged in and chosen a page to edit, you'll see the main editing screen.

Each area of the page that you can edit will have a corresponding field on the main editing screen. Usually each page will have at least a Title and a Body Copy field, but some pages may have extra fields as well.

To make it easier to see what you're doing, you can make the text entry area bigger by clicking and dragging the resize widget to the bottom right of a text entry area.

Typing text directly

The easiest way to enter your text is to type it directly into the content fields. Simply click in a field and start typing. You can add formatting such as creating headings, normal paragraphs, bolding, lists and so on using the toolbar.

The bottom row of the toolbar comes in handy to correct errors with undo (Ctrl-Z) and redo (Ctrl-Y), and you can also cut (Ctrl-X), copy (Ctrl-C) and paste (Ctrl-V), as you can in other applications.


Hint: If your text appears too large (like this) you need to convert it to a paragraph.

Copying and pasting from Microsoft Word

Many clients like to type up their website text in Microsoft Word first. If you like to work like this, then the best way to get your text into your web site is using the Paste from Word tool. Simply select your text in word and hit Ctrl-C or select Edit > Copy from the menu, then switch to your web browser to paste in the text by clicking the Paste from Word icon. This will remove any Word-specific formatting that will not translate to the web.

If you're using Internet Explorer, you may see a popup window (depending on your security settings) asking for permission to proceed.

Click Allow access and the content will appear in your editor window.

If you're using Firefox, a popup window will appear. Click in the big white content area, hold down the Ctrl key and hit V to paste in the contents of your clipboard, then click the Insert button. The text will appear in your editor window. (If you get an error message when you try to paste into the window, please see instructions for enabling copy and paste in Firefox).

Once the content has been pasted in, you may need to reapply some formatting using the toolbar.

Why all the hassle? Using this method ensures that your web pages end up with all formatting instructions restricted to a linked stylesheet, which has the following advantages:

  • Your pages are more search-engine friendly (as they aren't cluttered with formatting codes)
  • Your pages are more accessible to people using assistive technologies (eg. blind people)
  • Your pages load faster keeping all your visitors happy!

Saving your changes

When you've finished editing your page, click the Save button to update your web site. If you make a mistake, you can click the Cancel button to return to the menu without saving.

There are save and cancel buttons at the top and bottom of the main editing screen for your convenience.

Allowing clipboard access in Firefox (for copy and paste)

Some versions of firefox automatically prevent websites from accessing the clipboard, which means that trying to paste text from other applications throws up an error message. If you encounter this error, you need to tell Firefox that it can trust your website, as follows.

  1. Open the user preferences file user.js, using a text editor such as notepad. If this file doesn't exist, then create it, pasting in the lines shown below in step 2.

    On Windows 2000, XP and Vista, you'll find this file at:
    C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[profile name]\user.js
    where [username] is your Windows username and [profile name] is the name of your active profile (probably the only profile directory).

    For other operating systems, see mozillaZine for help with finding the profile files.
  2. Add the following lines to the end of the user.js file:

    user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "allowclipboard");
    user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.sites", "http://www.yourdomain.com");
    user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.cutcopy", "allAccess");
    user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.Clipboard.paste", "allAccess");

    If you already have similar lines in your user.js, then you simply need to add your site to the allowed sites in the second line (using spaces to separate each website)  e.g. user_pref("capability.policy.allowclipboard.sites", "http://docs.google.com http://www.yourdomain.com");
  3. Restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

Note: The examples above use www.yourdomain.com - you need to replace this with your actual domain. 

If you don't like the idea of editing files like this, you might want to try the third party extension AllowClipboard Helper.

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