Creating and editing web pages

The Pages box is where you deal with the three types of Web content which you can manage in the Sites4Doctors package: pages, documents (which behave like pages) and pictures (which you insert into pages).

A website consists essentially of pages. Sites4Doctors pages consist of text, to which you can apply quite a wide range of styles. It is because pictures are published by inserting them into page, and documents are really a special kind of page, that they are all managed in the Pages box. This section deals specifically with web pages - the others have their own sections.

The web-page editor

The heart of the page creation and editing forms is the Editize WYSIWYG (’What You See Is What You Get’) web-page editor. This is effectively a cut-down word-processor, so if you can use Word, WordPerfect or any other similar package to produce basic documents, you can create and modify pages for your website.

We have written our own extensive help text for Editize, accessed via the link above the editor window.

You can either type text directly into the editor window or copy-and-paste it from your favourite word-processor, in which case Editize will do an excellent job of preserving your formatting (including things like bulleted lists and tables) but will strip out all the ’junk’ to produce clean, efficient web code.

We have deliberately limited the range of styling options because your website is controlled by its own style sheet, which ensures that fonts, styles, sizes and colours are consisten across your site, and which can be cutomised to suit your own preferences.

For any paragraph, you can select Heading, Sub-heading or Paragraph styles. You can select a group of paragraphs and turn it into a bulleted or numbered list. You can give a selected block of text left, centre or right alignment and indent or outdent it. You can make any selected portion of text bold, italic, underlined or highlighted (the effect of which is controlled by your site’s style sheet, so it could produce any style and/or colour of text), or make it into a hyperlink which can be clicked to take the user to any other page on your site or to any other website. You can insert and manipulate pictures. And you can insert tables to handle structured data or give you greater control over page format.

Managing pages

When you create a page in any folder, this creates links in the Pages box on the Site Management System home page which allow you to preview the page, edit it, make it the folder’s home page (see next section) or delete it.

Folder home pages

Every folder must have a home page - the one that is displayed when a patient clicks the button for the folder. If you have created a home page, it will be displayed. If not, the system will generate one ’on the fly’.

As mentioned above, when you create a page, its links in the Pages box will include one to Make home page. Clicking this will instantly make that page the folder’s home page. You can remove a folder’s home page by clicking a link in the Folders box.

Automatic home pages

If a folder does not have a home page, the system will create one ’on the fly’ when anyone visits that folder. The headline will be the title of the folder, assigned when the folder is created. The page will then contain an automatically generated list of links to all the web pages and documents in the folder. You can give the folder some Introductory text when creating or editing it, using a cut-down version of the Editize web-page editor.

This facility is intended to make the publication of documents very easy: simply upload a series of documents into a folder, and the system will instantly generate a home page with links to all of them, complete with a title and introductory text.

You can even convert an automatic home page into a real page simply by clicking a link while previewing the page. Then you can edit the page - perhaps to organise the links into date order or group similar documents together with subheadings.