Website Marketing - Surefire Design

If you are new to creating links in your Surefire Design website editor, you probably need to start by reading ‘Learn to create links step by step’, or check out the online help.

If you are confident with copying the URL, selecting the link text, clicking on the chain link button, and pasting the URL into the URL field, then the following extra bells and whistles might be for you!

One really useful thing you can do with links is make them open in a pop up window.
This is especially important when the link is to someone elses website.
The reason is you don’t want visitors clicking on a link to someone elses site, that replaces your site when the new site loads.
With the new site opening in a pop up window, your site will still be open in a window behind it!

There isn’t much to it. You can make this setting at the time you create the link. Or if the link already exists, right click on it and select Edit Link.

This window should look familiar. Click on the Target tab.

Then from the drop down list, select the one that says New Window (_blank), press Ok and you are done!

NOTE You can do the same thing if you have an image that is a link. Just set the target to New Window (_blank).

NOTE Another handy link tip, if you have a link you have messed up or want to remove. Just right click on the link in the editor and select Remove Link. Simple!

Links aren’t as mysterious as they may first seem.
Links are made up of two parts

a) the text that people will actually click on and
b) the address or location the link takes you to.

STEP 1
The first step is to browse on the internet to the page you want to link to. This may be a page on your website, or a page on someone elses website. Either way the important thing is that it’s a live page on the internet that anyone can browse to in their web browser.

STEP 2
Once you get there all you need to do is copy the web page address from the address bar.
This is the bar at the top of your browser that shows the domain name and some other information after it. e.g. http://www.surefiredesign.co.nz/content-management.php.

Select all of this and copy it (ctrl c or right click and select copy). You can close that website now, as we have what we need.

STEP 3
Back in the Surefire Design editor for your website, select (highlight) the text that you are going to make into the text people will click on.

STEP 4
Once this text is highlighted, click on the editor toolbar button with the chain link on it.
Paste (ctrl v or right click and select paste) the address you copied into the URL field.

STEP 5
Press Ok and you are done!
This will be a live link on your website once you have saved and published.

If you want to do more with links, such as making them open in pop up windows etc, check out ‘Cool Advanced Links Features In Your Website Editor’.

One other tip, when selecting the text that your visitors will actually click for the link, it is worth making sure this text says something meaningful. Just making the words ‘Click Here’ the whole link doesn’t explain where the visitor will go when they click on it. Whereas making the whole sentence a link ‘Click here to learn more about our new products’, is much more intuitive.
This also has some very small benefits when Google comes along to read your content and links, but that is for another article!

By now you may have noticed that your menu ordering system has been upgraded.

How it works
The new system is a “drag and drop” system; meaning all you need to do is use your mouse to click on a page and drag it to where you want it to be.

Why the change?
We identified the ordering of your website menu as a key activity that we could develop to be easier and faster for you to use.
The change has been several months in development and uses the latest technology. We are pleased to congratulate you on being one of our first customers to benefit from this new system, which is just one of a number of changes we are currently working on to improve your website management experience.

Ordering my website pages

Expanding and collapsing
These buttons effect what you see while you are re-ordering your menu.
You can choose to see ALL available files by clicking “Expand…” or just see the one’s on the base level of your menu by clicking “Collapse…”

Menu items with sub-pages are indicated by a small triangle on their left. Clicking on the triangle allows you to expand or collapse the item as illustrated below:

Moving pages around
Moving pages around is easy.
Simply locate the page you want to move, hold down the left click on your mouse and drag it to where you want to relocate it. You will notice a “thin blue line” showing you where your page will be positioned once you release your mouse.
While dragging a page, a green tick (or red cross) indicates whether the page can be moved to your target destination.
The best way to become familiar with moving pages around is to get in and have a go! - you won’t break anything, and your changes only save when you hit “SAVE”!


The example above illustrates the “web blog” page being moved from below “online shops” to between the “site re-design” and “maintenance” pages.

Archived pages, off-menu pages, and saving
A final few things worth a mention - to help you get the most from the new system…
Archived pages are listed in grey italics (these pages of course don’t display on your live website) e.g. NEW ZEALAND in the example below.

Your website may have a restriction on the number of base menu items (for example if you have a horizontal menu, this might only fix X number of menu pages). When this limit is exceeded this will be indicated by a dotted line and live pages that won’t display are grey e.g. CONTACT in the example below.

Finally, once you are happy with your changes, click the big green SAVE button! - or if you’re not happy, simply leave the manage menu order screen and your changes won’t be saved.

Enjoy!

Ok so if you have read our blog article “How to embed a YouTube video into the Surefire content management system” then you are going to realise this blog article is a complete ripoff of that!
On the positive side, you will pretty much know how to do this already!

Putting a Google Map into a page on your website using the Surefire Design content management system isn’t particularly difficult, but you need to take a little care…

Here is the Google Specific part-

1. Browse to Google Maps - http://maps.google.co.nz/ and search for the address you want…
2. At the top right of the Google Maps page is a link called ‘Link’. Click on this.



3. A popup will appear. On this popup, click the link that says “Customise and preview embedded map”.



4. The popup window that results, will let you select a size, or type in a custom size. Change the zoom settings, choose the map type - street, satellite, terrain. Even drag the map to the position you want.



5. Once you have set your custom settings, copy everything in the box in step 3. Select everything in the box and right click copy, or ctrl C. This is the code you will paste into the editor.

Then the Surefire part-

1. Open the page in the WebStart editor.
2. In the spot where you want to put the map, type something you will recognise… personally I type *******.



3. Then click on the ‘Source’ button on the toolbar. This will show you the actual html code for the page.



4. VERY CAREFULLY look through the html code for the ******* you typed. Delete the *s and making sure the cursor is in the right place, right click and select paste. This will drop in the code you copied from Google Maps.





5. Press the ‘Source’ button again to get back to the usual view. You should see the map embedded in the content now! If it isn’t… do NOT save the page. Go out and start again.

Putting a YouTube video into a page on your website using the Surefire Design content management system isn’t particularly difficult, but you need to take a little care…

Note: we have just added the blog post How to embed a google map into the surefire content management system. This article is suspiciously similar!! The process is exactly the same.

Sign up for a free YouTube account at http://www.youtube.com/create_account, and follow their instructions to upload your clip.

Then browse to your clip in YouTube. You will see (for all clips on YouTube) there is a field called Embed. This has the code in it that we want to copy and paste into the editor.
There are all sorts of setup options these days, colours, sizes, players, borders etc. But the simplest is to select the code in the Embed box and copy.

1. Open the page in the WebStart editor.
2. In the spot where you want to put the video, type something you will recognise… personally I type *******.



3. Then click on the ‘Source’ button on the toolbar. This will show you the actual html code for the page.



4. VERY CAREFULLY look through the html code for the ******* you typed. Delete the *s and making sure the cursor is in the right place, right click and select paste. This will drop in the code you copied from YouTube.





5. Press the ‘Source’ button again to get back to the usual view. You should see the video embedded in the content now! If it isn’t… do NOT save the page. Go out and start again.