Back to the Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid Video
welcome in this video we will discuss
the top 10 most common mistakes that are
made when editing a website let's get
started
it's most common to
create a link to somewhere by simply
navigating to that page let's say i
wanted to create a link to this mount
evans page here
now normally what you do is you grab the
url like this you highlight from the
address bar
you copy it and then you use that for
your link
now there's one major problem with this
particularly for people who are building
a new website and that's uh the fact
that your your
sort of initial build is going to be
in something called the staging
environment so your url is going to have
a little dot stg kind of like what you
see right here
but when your site goes live
that little stg is going to go away so
you can imagine if you create a link
that has a stg in it and then your site
goes live what you're going to end up
doing is pointing people to your stage
site rather than the current site that's
there
so the better way to do this is to use a
little feature called linkit let me show
you how that works
first we're going to create a page
next we're going to add our text for the
hyperlink
and you're going to highlight the part
of the text and you want to make the
link
and in this case since we're trying to
link to a page on our website
we're going to click this little button
right here we'll link with the plus icon
we're going to start searching for the
page name
click the page name under the content
section
and it's going to create what's called a
relative path link for you it should
look like this
and you click save
and you'll see once i save this page
that the link will connect
to the correct page and it it it won't
matter whether you've created the page
or link the page in the staging
environment or not
if you create the link that way it'll
open up in the correct site
so another common mistake for users is
to write content for their site in like
a word processing document or maybe
they're just copying content from
another webpage and they copy and paste
directly into that page
now this actually can cause some issues
with how the page looks so let's say
i've got this document here you can see
i've got all sorts of formatting going
on i've got um you know some different
text and and font sizes up here we've
got some text colors some indents
some bolding so
all this stuff here if i just try to
simply copy and paste everything that's
on this page
and i try to paste it into an existing
page or a new page that i created
by doing a simple control v or command v
you're going to get this warning message
saying um that you're trying to paste
something in this case from word it's
going to ask if you want to clean the
formatting and if you click ok you'll
see it actually doesn't so
right now it's using different
fonts and all that stuff that was
directly copied over from the word
document and you know depending on how
you want the page to look that might be
fine but it's going to be quite
different from what the site defaults
are so unless you've applied the same
formatting to every other page on your
site it's going to look pretty
inconsistent so
the better way to go around about this
is to use a keyboard shortcut to remove
formatting while you're pasting content
from somewhere else
that keyboard shortcut is ctrl shift v
or
command shift v if you're using a mac
so if i do control shift v you'll see it
actually removes all the excess
formatting
paste the text in the same font as the
rest of the page and yes it's going to
leave you with a little bit of manual
work to you know remove some of the
stuff here
which is probably why it's better to
start building out the content in the
page itself if you can
um but yeah so you'll see that that that
way we can keep
this page looking consistent with the
rest of the other pages
there you go
so yet another common mistake we often
see people do is they they'll actually
accidentally delete their home page uh
this is possible because if you go into
content where you go into your overview
you can find your home page by searching
home
and you'll see it's just another content
type that appears here along with the
rest of your pages and you do get the
option to delete the page the problem is
if you delete the home page this isn't
something you can reverse so we're not
going to be able to recover your
homepage for you
there's no way to kind of get it rebuilt
for you you'll have to rebuild it
yourself
we can turn any other landing page you'd
like into a homepage for you if this
happens
but typically you don't want to do that
because it's going to break the home
page anybody that tries to go to your
url is going to find an error message so
the better way to go about this is if
you want to change whatever is going on
your homepage you can either a just edit
the existing home page and make your
changes there of course the system will
allow you to to save drafts if it's kind
of like a work in progress you need to
work on it over time
the other thing you can do is you can
actually create a totally separate
landing page and with that landing page
you can either let our service desk know
or if you're working with a project
manager you can let your pm know
that you want to make that page your new
homepage and we can go into the
configuration of the site for you and
set that up as a separate home page so
rule of thumb do not delete your home
page
now another common mistake we'll see is
that people will
want to remove the secondary footer
that's enabled in their site um every
site can be provisioned with two sort of
sections in the footer area so there's
gonna be the main footer that has all
the state transparency accessibility
links all that kind of stuff and then
there's a secondary footer that you can
utilize if you want that will also
display across the site and you can add
things like contact info or whatever you
need but in some cases people don't want
to use that
and so
the common mistake is that people just
delete the block and we have removed
most of the ways that you could actually
get around deleting this
which is a good news but still
seems like every once in a while someone
won't be able to try to delete their
footer and that's actually a really bad
thing because it the footer is tied to
other functionality on your site it
takes development resources for us to be
able to
get that working again and so it takes
time to get it reenabled which means
there might be a little bit of time
before your site's back to fully
functioning order so instead if you
don't want to utilize that footer all
you got to do is edit the block by
clicking on the little contextual pen
icon clicking edit
and simply remove
any content that's in the block so
you're not deplete deleting the block
you're just removing the content from
the block after that you just click save
and the photo will be gone
now another common issue comes along
when a user no longer needs editing
access to the site and you want to
revoke the editing permissions
now you'll see if you have
a user admin role you can click on this
people tab here you can view any of the
users that have permissions on your site
you can edit other users and you'll see
at the very bottom of any user account
you have the option to cancel the
account now this gets really dangerous
because if you cancel the account you
delete that user account
potentially any content that that user
touch whether it be revisions for pages
or whole entire pages themselves could
be erased from the site and there's no
getting that back so instead of
canceling account wholesale what we
recommend doing is editing the user
account for whoever it is
unchecking those user roles just to make
sure that even if they were somehow able
to get in they still wouldn't have
permissions and then simply just change
the status from active to blocked and
click save and that will ensure that
that user can no longer log into the
website or make any changes
so yeah another common mistake we see is
that it can be really easy to not do
proper review of your pages after you
make edits to them
one of the best things you can do is to
review
the page that you've just edited
in circumstances where other people are
going to see the page so whenever you're
logged in you're making changes there's
potential for your view to be different
from what other people see so the best
way around this is to simply copy the
url for the page you're working on and
open a private window now in google
chrome there's going to be these little
menu options over here where you can
click on that and choose new incognito
window if you're using firefox you can
use the keyboard shortcut ctrl shift p
or command shift p if you're on mac um
basically any web browser is going to
allow you to get into some sort of
incognito or private mode so i'll open
up a private window paste the url for my
page
so you see when the page loads um i'm
actually logged out so i'm viewing the
page as other people will see the page
now it's also really important to check
what the mobile views are for your web
pages
you could of course check on your own
mobile device
but a lot of browsers will also emulate
this for you
so if you do the keyboard shortcut f12
in chrome
it'll pull up the inspector view and you
can click this little icon here you want
to make sure that that is toggled on
and it will allow you to choose
different mobile devices to preview from
so i can see what this page looks like
on an iphone 10.
i can make sure that everything's
stacking nicely making sure that all the
images and everything are adjusting as i
expect
you can check on you know it's probably
good to check on a few different devices
if you can
looks like everything looks good here
once you're done you can click the
little x
another really important aspect of
reviewing your pages is to test
everything out make sure everything
works the way you expect it to um of
course like we just talked about
reviewing the page in a private window
is great checking mobile is great but
you know also do things like click on
each of the links make sure the links
are opening the way you expect them to
check any of the other additional
features like this icon card here is
it's going to open to google like i
expect yes it does great
you know things like that are going to
really make the user experience so much
better for the people who visit your
site because you'll know that the page
is functioning as it should
another common error we see is that
people will
tend to upload images into the media
library without actually cropping them
now depending on where you're going to
place the images the cropping actually
doesn't apply but two particular regions
are the jumbotron of like a homepage
like you see here
and also featured images and so with
those two
placements you'll essentially need to
crop the image to ensure that it's going
to display that we wanted to so you know
right now i've got this picture of these
apartments in downtown denver but
they're not quite focused on what i want
there's a bridge somewhere down here in
this in the middle section of the
picture that i really want to call
attention to so
to fix this what i'm going to do is i'm
going to go into my media library
i'm going to find the image here's the
image right here of the denver
apartments
and i'm going to adjust the hero
cropping for the jumbotron this is going
to apply for either the jumbotron or any
hero rows that you use
and all you got to do is click inside
and drag the little box
and then place it where you'd like
and likewise if you're going to do like
a featured image featured crop is right
here so you can adjust that there once
you're done with your cropping you can
scroll down and click save
and we'll go back to our home page
and you'll see in the jumbotron section
now the image is now adjusted it's
fitted to exactly where i want the image
to focus on
another understandable mistake that
we'll see people make is that if they
have a page that's been published then
they want to remove it from the public
eye but they don't want to delete it
what we see people tend to do at least
sometimes is they'll go into edit and
they'll change the page to a draft and
they'll click save
now this can be a little bit deceiving
because when you change a publish page
back to a draft
it'll look like the page has been
unpublished you see that there's a pink
background there indicating such but
really when you save a published page
and revert it back to a draft what ends
up happening is the system saves two
versions of that page so now we have a
latest version
which is the unpublished version and
then we have if we click on view here we
see that the published version before
any possible changes were made before it
was saved is still there
so the best way to get around this is
first i'll have to revert this back to a
publish page so i can show you
this will only work with an existing
publish page
what you'll do is you're going to
instead archive the page so we're going
to click on the edit tab again
and we're going to scroll down and this
will only appear when the current state
is published so if you
choose archived click save
you'll see that now the page is fully
unpublished you see you'll see the pink
background there and that's what that's
indicating and there's also no
current version tab so that's how you
remove a page from public view without
deleting a wholesale
so the last kind of common error we want
to point out is the fact that when you
get a newly provisioned website you'll
see that there's a few default menu
links that get added to your main
navigation
in particular a couple of those is
contacts and events now contacts and
events are actually not regular pages
these are automated views that have a
particular functionality to them
now if you don't want to use these it's
better to not delete the links wholesale
instead what you can do is go to
structure
menus main navigation
and instead of deleting this what i'm
going to do is i'm going to scroll down
to where those links are and i'm going
to simply uncheck
the boxes for
under the enabled column here and that
will disable these links so that they'll
stay here if you ever want to
incorporate that functionality in your
site in the future
but they'll be hidden from the main nav
and so other people won't be able to see
it they won't be able to click on it and
you won't have to manage it
you'll see here if we let that save
i'll go back to my home here
and voila there are no contact or events
links
so we hope that was helpful if you have
any more questions feel free to reach
out to our service desk or the project
manager you're working with we also have
a web page detailing all these things
that we've covered here today in this
video
and thanks for watching