Editing the homepage

If you've successfully logged in to edit your site, you should see a green border surrounding the central content section of the page. At the top of the green box you should find the action tabs.

Two of these tabs are important for our current purposes.

• The View tab: click on this tab to see the public view of the content; and,
• The Edit tab: click on this tab to edit the current content.

Click on the Edit tab to open a form that will allow you to edit your home page.

This form has three fields (editable areas): Title, Description and Home Page Body Text. (The body text field has been vertically compressed in the illustration above.)

Title

This is the title for the page. It will appear at the top of the page's text, in the title bar for the browser and in navigation lists and search results. This field is special on the homepage because it also sets the title for the site.

Description

A short, generally only a sentence or two, summary of what the page is about. This shows up at the top of the page's text and in content lists and search results.

Body Text

The bulk of the text for the page. This field is special because it may be more richly formatted. The green-shaded formatting button bar controls formatting.

Let's make some changes. First, change the title as necessary to get your organization's name correct. In this case, we're just adding "The" to the beginning.

Then, put the shortest introductory text you can manage into the Description field.

Now, move on to the Body Text field. Type some text into the field. Don't worry about formatting except to press the Enter key at the end of each paragraph. Make your first line be something that you'd like to use for a header.

You should be able to edit the text you've entered via conventional text editing commands.

Now, let's turn that first line into a header. Position your editing caret (which marks the point of action) in the first line and click in the style-selection drop-down (which will initially read Normal).

The drop-down style menu should offer some basic text formatting choices.

Choose Subheading from the menu.

The result should be something like that in the illustration at the right: the current paragraph will be bold and larger.

If it doesn't look exactly like this, or what you want, play around! Get a feel for what the styling buttons do to the current paragraph or selected text.

Saving Your Work

Look at the bottom of the form to find the Save button, which will be in a group with Next and Cancel. Press the Save button.

After the server and its content-management system do a bit of work, you'll be returned to the View action page.

Note our new title, description and body text.

Log out, if you're done for now, or follow along in our next step.

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