How To Format Your Content

When you enter your con­tent, you enter it in what is called a WYSIWYG edi­tor (which stands for What You See Is What You Get).  What this means is that you have tools very much like a word-pro­cess­ing appli­ca­tion at the top of the edi­tor that allow you to for­mat your con­tent.  You can bold text, change the col­or, make data into lists, etc.   How­ev­er, before you start for­mat­ting your con­tent, we need to talk about two impor­tant things:

  • First, do not get car­ried away with for­mat­ting until your web­site’s cus­tom theme is fin­ished.  Adding a link, or the occa­sion­al bold-ed text is fine when you are start­ing out, but do not start increas­ing text size, chang­ing fonts, or jus­ti­fy­ing text until we’ve had a chance to work through your the­me’s design.  When the theme is uploaded, what you see in this screen will change it’s appearance.The rea­son for this is that I can take care of the major­i­ty of the for­mat­ting you need.  If you want all of your sub­head­ings to be a cer­tain size and col­or, I can make it hap­pen auto­mat­i­cal­ly.  Same if you want all of your quotes to be indent­ed, etc…  The point is to think about how you want com­mon ele­ments in your con­tent to look, and I will pro­gram your pages to look this way with­out you hav­ing to for­mat a thing.
  • Sec­ond, over-for­mat­ting your text can break your page. The fact of the mat­ter is that although this edi­tor behaves like a word-proces­sor, it isn’t.  What it actu­al­ly does is write the prop­er HTML code to dis­play your page behind the scenes.  You can see this code by click­ing the “HTML” but­ton at the top right of the edi­tor — this is a good thing to do occas­sion­al­ly so you can get a sense of how your code works.  (To switch back to the edi­tor, click the “Visu­al” but­ton).  The prob­lem is that it for­mats your con­tent by ADDING code, not sub­tract­ing it.  There­fore, if you’ve changed your font 6 times, there are now 6 lev­els of code that have been applied to that text, and when it gets that deep, errors start to creep in.You can attempt to clean this up by using the “Remove For­mat­ting” but­ton (The eras­er), but some­times this does­n’t work and you will need to give me a call.