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Editing, or creating a new page on your website

June 18, 2008

Editing, or creating a new page on your website.

Although all php websites I create are intended as a fully automated solution. I know that one or two people would like to make alterations to their site. As such I have created the following instructions to give you an idea of how easy it is to make changes to any of the article pages, or to create and add new pages.

Little or no php or html knowledge is required to do this. I recommend that any editing or page creation is done on your PC, rather than from the hosting account. Although there is both editing facilities and normally a reasonable built in editor on most hosting packages, it is easy to make a mistake and that mistake cannot be reversed using online editing functions.

Notepad is ideal for simple editing and page creation, as very little coding is required. If you prefer to use an editor, simply ensure that you do not use a WYSIWYG editor [What You See Id What You Get] As they do not quite live up to their name. well not for php sites anyway. They will basically mess up the php coding and your resulting page will quite simply not display correctly.

If you require an editor, but do not want to pay for one, try the following search link. You will see a few results for decent free editors you can download [all downloads are spyware free]

Free Html Editors

You will also require an FTP client. So again just in case you require one and do not want to pay, here is another search link for you…….

Free FTP Clients

First thing to do is to use FTP to download the page you wish to edit. Or if you are wishing to create a new page, download any one of the article pages from your site. They are all located within the public_html directory.

Open up the article page now on your editor, or notepad. now that you are looking at the code that makes up the page, if you are not used to editing php pages, you may be a little confused with all the code that appears to be there. Don’t let that put you off, as you will not have to edit any of it. All those php commands are simply there to call up the various items on any page such as the header image, title, keywords, menus, adsense code etc etc. The actual content of your page. i.e. what sits in the middle of the page, has almost no code on it at all. The pages have been built this way deliberately so it would be easy for almost anyone to edit.

First thing you may want to change of course is the title of the page. If you are just editing your article, you may not want to do this.
If however you are using this page to create a new page you will. So have a look at the top section [the meta tags] and you will
see the title tag with your page title quite clearly. It will really stand out in amongst all that php code.
Delete it and type in whatever you wish to call your page.

Now scroll down the page until you see………

Now the number 540 may be slightly different on your site as some sites of course are wider than others.
Below this area you will find your article. To edit your article, simply delete what you wish and right over it.
Or copy and paste it all into wordpad so the text wraps and you can work on it better.
When you are finished with it on wordpad, just copy and paste it over the original article
on the page you are editing. One thing to remember of course is that your article will be s
plit up into paragraphs and you have to make it display
that way on your page. The easiest way to do this is to simply
insert the following between each paragraph

Now if you are creating a new page then all you have to do is remove everything you see between the

and the

that follows the article. You can now insert whatever content you wish. If it is simply a new article then just type it in, or paste it in remembering to add in the

between each paragraph.

When you have finished editing, or creating your new page, save it with the extension of .php and now upload it into the public_html directory of the hosting account for your site, by ftp. If you have simply edited your page and kept the same title for your page, then that page will have now updated on your website. If however, you have created a new page you will not have to worry about updating the menu on your site or the sitemap as they are automated. The new page title will have been added and linked too, from the navigation menu on the left side [right side for longer sites] on all pages. The sitemap will also include the new page within its structure.

Hopefully this will make it as easy for those wishing to edit their pages or create new ones on their sites. There is only one way to make it even easier and that’s to get it done for you. There was a day when I used to do such things totally free of charge for any client who asked. However, with over 2000 websites currently hosted on my servers and many, many more clients with sites on their own hosting, this is now totally impossible. So please do remember if you really cannot do your own editing, you can hire someone to do it for you, by visiting places like Elance.com. I will do it for you, if you do not mind paying me hourly rate of course.

Please also note that I now create wordpress websites. These websites are ideal for those that like to make lots of changes to their site, or add in more pages, or content. They come with both html and text editors built into the admin area. They have easy to use features to allow the insertion of images and other media into pages and of course have a huge quantity of documentation available from the built in help link, for those that like to learn about their site and how to effectively administer it.

How to use the the partnerlinks page on your website

June 8, 2008

1. Login to your hosting account by ftp. Always best to use an ftp client to do this rather than a browser. If you do not have an ftp client you can select a free one by clicking here.

2. Open up the public_html directory and then the includes folder and locate the file links.inc. Download this file to somewhere on your pc you can easily find it.

3. Open the links.inc file. This can be opened with any standard html editor, but not a wysiwyg editor. If in doubt open it with notepad. Depending on your PC setup you may have to associate the notepad application with this kind of file first.

4. The links.inc file is a blank file that will take any html code and display it on the partnerlinks page of your site, when it is uploaded back into the includes folder by ftp.

5. Any banner code you already have can be pasted on this file. Each time you add a banner or a text link, remember to create space between each one by simply adding in

Unsure on how to create a hyperlink? Then click here.

6. When you are finished with the links you are creating close your file and select the option to save changes. Or select to save the file as, remembering to ensure that the file has a .inc extension, as notepad will automatically want to create a new file with the extension of .txt, which is of no use to you.

7. With your file saved, it is simply a matter of connecting to your site with an ftp client again and open up the public_html directory and then the includes folder and then upload your new links.inc file. When you now go to your site, the links you have created will appear on the partnerlinks page.
You can make as many changes as you wish to your links file, simply uploading it after you have finished

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