- A Brief Guide to Your New Site
- Logging into the Frontend of Your Site
- Editing Your Content From the Frontend
A Brief Guide to your Simplweb Site
Let’s look at your site, and learn about some of its features. You'll be changing the words on your website within a half hour.
Your site comes filled with sample content including menus, pages, and images. We've done all the hard work for you! If you want to get online fast, you can keep as much of this example content as you like.
Note:
If you did not receive an email from simplweb when you signed up, you'll need to create your site before jumping into this tutorial. To create a site, login to Simplweb and click on create sites. Scroll down to My Simplweb sites and look to the right for the green new button. Click > New. Choose a template from the dropdown menu. If you're not familiar with Joomla, you'll want to choose Myschool or Small Business so you can get sample content installed - this helps with the process of getting familiar with the backend (or administrator) section of your site. If you're really comfortable with Joomla, click empty. Add information to the subsequent fields, if you have any questions just roll over the blue info button for more information. Once your done, click save. Your site is now live.
Boy that was easy!
Task 1 - Check out your new site (5 minutes)
Browse to your new site and look around. The URL, or web address, of your new website was sent to you in your "Welcome to Simplweb" email, and is simply your account name, like this:
http://YOURSITE.simplweb.com
Note, there is no "www".
Take a few minutes and click around. Imagine you are a site visitor. Click around the various links and pages.
Your website is powered by a Content Management System(CMS)
A Content Management System is a very powerful type of software used to manage a website. A CMS uses templates to control the look and feel of the site.
A CMS separates the content of the pages from their graphical design. This makes it easy to keep the site-wide design coherent and easy to change. It also makes adding content easy for non-technical people.
Your new website, full of sample text and pre-configured menus, provides a starting point and a springboard to get you to what you really want- a website that is uniquely yours!
The Elements of your Simplweb Site
Your website has several elements that all work together to produce a web page. The main three elements are content, modules, and the template.
- Content is the text,images, and other information that is the meat of any good website
- Template controls how the website is presented, the look and feel or design
- Modules are tools that add functionality around the edges
Think of these three elements - content, modules, and templates - as three legs holding up a stool. Without any one of the three elements, any web page (the stool) on your website would fall down.
Take a look at this image below, known as a screenshot. It shows a sample Simplweb restaurant website (hence the "Isonomy Cafe"), with explanatory text around it to teach you about how these three elements come together:
On this sample web page, the content is a large column with an article title "Welcome to Isonomy Cafe." Various modules are shown in the right-side column and at the top and bottom.
Content Articles
The most important part of a website are the content articles. Simplweb helps you create, publish, and manage your content.
An article is an individual content item in the site. Sometimes we refer to an article as a Content Article, because that's exactly what it is- a single discrete piece of content. Articles are the primary way you will present information on your website.
Modules
Modules are smaller functional blocks that usually display information around the main part of the page, like a short blurb, a login form, or a newsflash. They are often smaller boxes around the outside edge of the articles.
In the example in the picture above, there are modules at the top: a news box and a menu. In the right column there are two custom content modules and then a login link module. At the bottom there is another custom content module and a special random module, and then finally the footer. All of these are modules. You'll learn more about how to control and customize modules later.
Templates
A template is simply a set of rules about presentation. For example, a template determines how many columns to use or what color to make titles. A template also determines the layout or positioning of the web page. The template acts as a filter (or lens) and presents the content you want it to, the way you want it to. There is no content in the template itself.
Now, let's dig into a single individual article and see how simple it is to edit content!
Logging into the Frontend of your site
You have the ability to control your website from two different sides, the Frontend and the administrative Backend. The frontend allows you to control your website from the perspective of a site visitor. The backend is a special portal into the inner workings of your website, and no site visitor will ever see it. The screenshot above shows the public "Frontend" of your site. If you want to edit a single particular article, the easiest way to do it is by logging into the Frontend.
Task 2 – Log into the Frontend of your site (1 Minute)
In your "Welcome to Simplweb" email, you received a login name and password that you'll need right now. Your username and password will look something like this:
Example Username: JustATest
Example Password: vhYesXyJ
Go to the front page of your website and click on the link that says login. This might either be in the side column or at the bottom of the page. You can also simply navigate to http://YOURSITE.simplweb.com/login.
Click that link and then enter your username and password.
This logs you into the Frontend of the site and allows you to edit articles in the context of the overall website, with the template and modules displayed around the content you're editing.
Once logged in, you will see that just above each article in the mainbody is a small icon that looks like a pencil and paper now appears.
If you're having trouble, you can watch a quick video of someone logging into their website.
Editing the content of your site from the Frontend
Now that we have logged in, we can just click on the Edit icon to make live changes to an article.
Task 3 – Edit an article (1 Minute)
Click on the edit icon, to bring up the editing screen. Change the title of the article, and maybe a word or two in the text. Try to avoid using punctuation in the title of the article when possible. When you're done, click Save.
If you have trouble with Task 3, watch this video which shows someone editing the title of an article.
We will be looking at more advanced editing in the next few days, like uploading pictures.
Task 4 – Edit the articles on your site (20 minutes)
Go through your site and edit the articles to match your needs a bit better. Don't worry about final copy at this point, we are just learning how to edit.
Move around your site and see which pages have articles on them that you can edit. From the Frontend you can edit anything that has the Edit icon above its title. You cannot, however, edit a module's content. You'll learn how to edit modules on Lesson 2. As you play around with the text on your site, don't worry about the images. Uploading, placing, and formatting images embedded in text is a more complicated task that deserves its own tutorial in a couple days.
Be sure to save often! Your site is going to log you out if you keep an editing window open and unused for more than a few minutes.
