Over the years we turn sites over to clients and the first they typically do is jump into the Editor and start highlighting and clicking on the icons! It's a natural instinct to start experimenting with them - but there are several reason why you might want to re-think that thought.
Our sites are designed with specific ideas at the top of the pages for a couple of reasons - these reasons are an accumulation of 20 years experience in the web business. While we can centrally change a sites design - it should be done site-wide to maintain consistency if this is the route you'd like to take.
So lets look at these reasons:
1. You have roughly 3-6 seconds to capture a viewer's attention. It is very important that you tell your version of the story ABOVE THE FOLD - this is the screen data that the viewer sees when they land on the page BEFORE THEY SCROLL to what's below. If you need more copy, there are many places on the web that you can get it without violating copyrights - Wiki is one of those places.
2. That top placement in most cases is designed to teach the Search Engine Bots where and whats important on the page. Having good SEO practices is extremely important when writing your copy. We lay out pages the way we do to make it easy to remember what content needs to be there for good/great search engine placement.
3. Just because something can be done, doesn't mean that it should be done. While we give you a lot pf power in the editor you NEED to use those tools with caution and for specific needs at that point. The system is designed with a Master Style Sheet that uses CSS Coding to format specific HTML Tags and Layouts. For example, when you select the HEADING 1 tag in the editor - the CSS Style might be set to:
- color: #FFF;
- font-size: 28px;
- line-height: 1;
- font-weight: 600;
- text-transform: uppercase;
These attributes tell EVERY H1 Tag what to do. So if you don't like one or all of those settings, then we change them at the Master CSS and the WHOLE site updates at one time. If you use the Color, Size...tools up on the tool bar for all you copy - you'll have to edit every single page should you want to make a slight change.
Also, using those tools creates a LOT of extra code that will really slow a page load time to a crawl. Those tools are really only for times when you have a very specific one-off need to change/highlight something in the page.
4. Just because something can be done, doesn't mean that it should be done; and this also goes for Linking Off-Site. You guys are or will be spending a lot of time and energy to get people to your site so that you can convert them to a client. Sending them to a page on someone else's site when your trying to sell them your products or services might not be the best idea.
But there are times when it makes sense - So, limit the links to a few - and when you do send them off-site MAKE SURE that you use TARGETS in the link tool - specifically, NEW WINDOW (_blank) as seen in the screen shot below. This opens a new window leaving your in the background and keeps it form getting lost.
Lastly:
5. If your going to lay out content in a tabular format - instead of using the SPACE BAR to align things up - you need to use TABLES. This allows you to direct the layout in specific ways making your page not only look nice and organized, but load much faster.
See this video:
https://ilgm.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/202503199-Formatting-with-Tables
Using the space bar causes a lot of extra code and doesn't look the same on different browsers and devices.
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