Formatting Text

In this video, we’ll take a look at formatting your text. The main thing to remember is that wild formatting can be a lot of fun, but simple and consistent is usually the most effective. You’ve probably seen websites like this example, where the designer had too much fun with the format buttons.

How to do a better job.
You have two options for adding text to your website. You can either type your text directly into the Page Editor, or you can copy it in from another source.

Cleaning Copied Text.
If you’re copying text in from an outside source, you need to first “clean” your text. Unless you clean the text, the formatting that you import could interfere with the html code in your page editor. To show you how the Word Clipboard works, we’ll clean the text on our example page. First we copy the text on our example page and then delete this text. Now click where you want to insert your text on the page. Then open up the Word Clipboard in your page editor.

When the clipboard opens, paste your text into it and click ok.

Your text is immediately cleaned and inserted onto your page. All you’re left with is plain text.

The Formatting Tool.
As I’ve already mentioned, when formatting text it’s good to remember that simple and consistent is usually most effective. For most situations, the formatting tool is your best bet. First select the text you want to format. Then click on the AA icon to open the format options.

Choose one of the options and it will format your selected text to match the style you choose. When you're finished click on the AA icon again to close the selection box.

Standard Formatting Options

1. Select Text and choose a Font Style...
2. Font Size
3. Bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, superscript and subscript
4. Text Color. Note that clicking on More Colors gives many more options
5. Background Color sets the color behind the text line.
6. Eraser Tool. Removes formatting for selected text.

The best ways to learn is by experiement. Good design takes practice. Because your website is so easy to use, and because you can make changes whenever you desire, you’ll have all the opportunity you want to develop your layout skills. Keep a careful eye on other websites and when you see a style you like perhaps you’ll get a new idea for your own website. Here's a look at the page we started with after applying simple format styles.