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Editing Do's and Don'ts

By following a few simple guidelines editing your pages will become much easier.

Resist the temptation...

Resist the temptation to place style elements - different fonts, font sizes, colours, text and paragraph alignment, different headings - in the content.

The purpose of a content management system is to separate the the style of a website (the look of the website) from the content of the website. This way if you want to change the overall look of the website you just change the style - the content remains the same.

If you use, in page, local styling, the added styles remain locked in with the content, which defeats the purpose of using a content management system in the first place.

Work with the CMS not against it!

Refrain from using too many fonts

An accepted rule of thumb, used by designers is to try to use no more than three fonts to a page.
Main Heading
Sub Heading
Paragraph Text
These are the three, you have to work with.

Want some bold text? Add one to the font count.
Want some italic text? Add one to the font count.

Any change to, the height of some of the text or the font face of some of the text then you add one to the font count in each case. So... You can see that the number of fonts can quickly mount up as any variation to the standard scheme is regarded as discrete font and is added to the overall font count.

Use a consistent style from page to page

Do not use, say, a centered heading on one page and a left aligned one on another or bigger fonts on one page than on another, as this distracts the viewer as they move from page to page.

Be careful when copying and pasting your content

Never copy your content directly from another application such as Microsoft Word directly into the CMS as it may contain hidden control codes and other characters, incompatible with the CMS. Copy it first into a text only editor such as notepad++ available from http://www.notepad-plus-plus.org and remove anything unwanted, then copy that into the CMS.

Last but not least...

Name your files the 'old-fashioned' way...

File and folder names must be plain text. You can not have characters such as an & ; $ @ % and so on in them.

It is better to use an underscore or a dash instead of a space in any file name, as the space is substituted with a %20 which is inserted by the CMS content editor. If you have to do any editing in HTML mode, as sometimes you must, you will be glad you did.

some_folder_name/some_file_name.ext
or (the preferred way)
some-folder-name/some-file-name.ext

instead of
some folder name/some file name.ext

which becomes
some%20folder%20name/some%20file%20name.ext

NOTE: At the same time, make sure that all file extensions are in lowercase.