Category Archives: Editing my website

Tips specifically for Surefire clients in how to make your own website changes easily.

How to take a screen shot, PC and Mac

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You’ve heard people say it, you may have seen them do it… but how DO you take a screen shot? It is incredibly handy!

 

PC Windows

 

Okay so on a PC in Windows you can take a screen shot of the whole screen of your computer by simply pressing the “PrtSc” button on your keyboard. It stands for ‘Print Screen’!
Then open something like a Microsoft Word document or a new email, or a drawing program of some type. Right click and select ‘Paste’ or use “Ctrl V” whichever you prefer.

 

Sometimes you don’t want a screen shot of the entire computer screen. It can be very handy to just capture the current window.

 

So make sure the window you want to capture is clicked on and then holding down the “Alt” button on your keyboard, tap the “PrtSc” button (then release the “Alt” button). Then just like above, open something like a Microsoft Word document or a new email, or a drawing program of some type. Right click and select ‘Paste’ or use “Ctrl V” whichever you prefer. Just that window will be pasted!

 

Microsoft OneNote

 

If you have Microsoft Office and use the OneNote application, it has a really nice capture built into it called screen clippings. This runs all the time and for MS OneNote 2010 can be used in the following way-

 

Just hold down the “windows” button on your keyboard (that’s the one with the windows flag on it that you’ve never used before!), and tap the “S” key. Very cool!

 

Apple Mac

 

With Apple Macs it is a case of using a program called Preview, or trying the following commands.

 

Command-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it as a file on the desktop
Command-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it as a file on the desktop
Command-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it as a file on the desktop
Command-Control-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it to the clipboard
Command-Control-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it to the clipboard
Command-Control-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it to the clipboard

 

Then open something like a new email, or a drawing program of some type. Select ‘Paste’ to insert.

 

 

Put up a team photo! (update contact details)

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Put up a team photo! (update contact details)Starting with Contact Details. When was the last time you checked your contact phone numbers, address details and postal details on the website?

 

Take a quick minute and do that now!
The quickest way for people to make contact with you is through your website. Finding where businesses have moved to has become even more important.

 

For everyone else, now would be a good time to check who the contact people are on your website, as staff changes and re-organisation go under the radar throughout the year.

 

Speaking of staff changes. As kiwis we can be a bit shy about having our photos put on our websites.

 

The benefit however is that new clients can get a nice personal feel for who your team are, and some idea of who they may meet.

 

1 Get the team together for a group shot.
Choose a neutral background preferably in natural light (outside on an overcast not too sunny day may be good).
Have a good laugh and get someone to take a lot of digital photos. Hopefully there will be one you can use!

 

2 Upload the photo to a Meet The Team page on the website.

 

 

 

 

Paste With Care – 3 simple rules

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Paste With Care - 3 simple rulesThink back to when we did training. The second most important thing you will have been told is – paste as plain text.

 

We all know online editors have some quirks. But the most significant is to do with pasting content.

 

The issues lay with what you can’t see. When you select and copy content from another source like a website or Microsoft Word, other hidden information comes with it.

 

In particular if you select and copy from MS Word, you also get lots and lots of hidden Microsoft tags and code. You can’t see it, but it will break your page and make your content look terrible, or impossible to format and edit.

 

Not to worry though! You can still copy content from elsewhere. The key is to use the following process.

 

1 Copy content from source
2 In your website admin put the cursor where you want the content.
3 DO NOT right click paste, or hit ctrl V! Instead press the paste as plain text button on the editor toolbar.
4 You may want to go and delete the lines between paragraphs, and replace them by hitting Enter. This makes them proper paragraphs so you can format headings.

 

It isn’t really complicated, but definitely is a discipline when you are used to using quick shortcuts for pasting.
NOTE you CAN copy and paste content within your own site. Either within the editor, or from your live site.

 

To see the process in detail watch the following Surefire Help Videos-

Part 1: Paste as plain text from another source
Part 2: Preparing pasted content for formatting
Part 3: Formatting text content

 

 

Step by step create a Facebook LIKE button!

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Step by step create a Facebook LIKE button!There are many many options when it comes to creating facebook Like buttons. This is the simple version!

 

* Choose the page on your website that you want to put the ‘Like’ button on.

 

* Browse to it and copy the address from the address bar.

 

* Follow this link to the Like code generation page on facebook. You don’t have to have a facebook account to do this! http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/#

 

* Complete the form. The preview of the button shows on the right. Paste in the web page address you copied into the ‘URL to Like’ field. Then click ‘Get Code’

 

* Copy the code in the box.

 

* Log in to your Surefire Design website admin and choose to edit the relevant page.

 

* Click on source view and very carefully paste the code into the page. Usually you would put the like button at the bottom of the page. Save and publish, and your Like button will appear on the site!

 

 

Step by step insert video into your website!

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Step by step insert video into your website!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…

 

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 button for Share, and then Embed.

 

Click on this and it will show the code that we want to copy and paste into the editor.
Select the code in the Embed box and copy.

 

1. Open your website page in the WebStart editor.

 

2. In the spot where you want to put the video, type something you will recognise when we start looking through the code… 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 ******* 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.