by Teresa Thomas

As I train our clients to use PICO, our custom-built CMS, I find myself giving the same helpful hints over and over. These hints are basic and apply to almost any website (and sometimes just plain documents as well).
 

1) Use dashes instead of spaces in your file names.

When uploading a picture to your site, image names and folder names cannot have spaces. If there is a space anywhere in the “image path” (the url that gets assigned to your image when you upload it), some browsers and many Social Media sites cannot read it. The image will appear as a broken link or will not appear at all. Instead of naming your picture Cookie Monster.jpg, name it Cookie-Monster.jpg.

2) Use tables without borders to line up images and text.  

Often you want to include a bit of text with a person’s image, or to put a row of logos with the appropriate company name underneath. Instead of trying to tab and space these items into their proper alignment, add a table. Set the borders/lines to 0 and your images and text will look neat and tidy without the bulk of lines throughout. In fact, it required a table with two smaller tables embedded inside to get all of these images and their text to align properly here. Tables can be intimidating, but they really are a powerful tool. Play around with them and see what amazing wonders of information you can organize beautifully!

This is an image of cookie monster neatly aligned with some text

vs

This is also an image of Cookie Monster, neatly aligned with some text but without visible table borders.

3) Try not to paste text directly from Word onto your website.

Word is an excellent composition tool (I’m writing with it at this very moment), but it carries its own set of code for formatting. If you paste directly from Word, that code gets carried over and makes any sort of text editing from that point onward cumbersome at best and completely nutso at worst. It’s best to remove Word’s formatting by pasting as plain text. If your content editor has clipboards, use one of them to paste in new text.

4) Use keyboard shortcuts!

These are some of my most-used shortcuts. Found in MOST text editing systems, they will save you time and headaches:

Shift + enter is word wrap – if you want to force text to the next line but not have a big gap between lines, use shift+enter instead of just enter.

Ctrl(cmd) + C is copy – this shortcut will copy any text (and sometimes images) you have highlighted.

Ctrl(cmd) + V will paste that text (and/or images) wherever your cursor is currently located.

If you are copying/moving everything from a section of content, ctrl(cmd) + A will select everything for you all at once.

Ctrl(cmd) + Z is undo – this is my very favorite shortcut EVER. This simple shortcut allows me to bravely edit onward, knowing that if I do something crazy (either accidentally or purposefully) I can hit ctrl+Z and everything will go back to the way it was.

Here's a great resource for these and other keyboard shortcuts.