Editing Your Website on SecurePanel.US
To maintain your website’s functionality, SEO optimization, and appearance, please simply email your website change requests to us. Changes such as addresses and phone numbers, requested efficiently, are usually billed as fifteen minutes of work. Be sure to have a time-fee authorization on file with us, and email instructions on an as-needed basis.
Exception: EZPost is designed to make it very easy and safe for you to add, edit, and delete posts on your website. If EZPost is installed on your website, we encourage you to login to EZPost’s admin panel and get creative.
You are also free to have any other website designer work on your website, upload a new website, add different websites, etc.
However, if you prefer to change the pages of your website yourself, SecurePanel.US gives you complete access to all the files of your website. You can download the files to your computer, change them, and upload them back to your SecurePanel. This is essentially what we do when editing your website. SecurePanel.US also gives you software that enables you to edit the text of your website live, on the server. From SecurePanel home, click File Manager. Then click public_html or the directory containing the website you would like to edit. Then right-click the file you would like to edit and click Code Editor. Do not click Rich Text Editor for this process. Rich Text Editor is not for editing website pages.
Selecting Which Page to Edit: Most of your pages are clearly named: About.html, Careers.html, Contact.html, etc. Because of the way servers work, the home page of the website is named index. If you are unsure, use your favorite Internet browser, such as Chrome, and navigate to the page you would like to edit. Look in the address bar at the top of the screen. You will see your domain name, a forward slash, and the file name of the page. If you see more than one forward slash, the page in question is in a subdirectory. For instance, if the address of the page is YourDomain.com/Employee-Of-The-Month/April.html, in File Manager, you would find this page by clicking public_html » Employee-Of-The-Month (folder) » and then you would see April.html.
Code Editor: Right-click the file you want to edit, and select Code Editor. In Code Editor, you can click in the code and then click CTRL + F to launch a search box. The search box you need will appear at the top right of the code window. If the search box appears outside the code window, it’s the wrong search box. Exit that, click inside the code window, and try pressing CTRL + F again.
Search for some words out of the block of text you want to edit. The search is case sensitive. Change the text you want to edit, and click Save. Most of the text you will want to edit will be between > and <. Text that is between < and > is not visible text but is instead a command that makes the website or design work.
Tips:
- Before editing your website, put the hosting in Development Mode. From SecurePanel home, click Edge Caching, and toggle on Development Mode. This will make your changes live for everyone immediately. Without Development Mode, it can take up to 24 hours for CDN caching to let you and everyone else to see your changes live. You can actually toggle on development mode at any point in your editing process.
- Download a copy of the file you are editing before making changes. If you mess up, you can upload your backup to start over. Alternatively, in SecurePanel home, use Backup/Restore to backup the entire website before editing it.
- Find Word Wrap at the bottom of Code Editor. Set it to “Column 80 characters.” This makes the display much easier for editing text. You might find Dark Mode easier to read as well.
- Want to make a new paragraph? Put a <p> at the beginning of your paragraph and a </p> at the end.
- Want to drop down just one line? Add <br>.
- Want to make a new heading? Put an <h1>, <h2>, or <h3> at the beginning of your heading, depending on what size you want. Then close it with a matching </h1>, </h2>, or </h3>.
- Want to bold some text? Wrap that text in <strong> and </strong>.
- Italics? Wrap the text in <em> and </em>.
- Underline? Wrap the text in <u> and </u>.
- Link? Wrap the text in <a href=”the address to which you want to link”> and </a>. Example: to link to Brazzell Marketing Agency, preceed your link text with <a href="https://brazzellmarketing.com">, and follow your link text with </a>.
- A list with a dot at the beginning of each line item? Wrap the entire list in <ul> and </ul>. Then, wrap each list item in <li> and </li>. UL stands for unordered list, and LI stands for list item.
- A numbered list? Wrap the entire list in <ol> and </ol>. Wrap the list items in <li> and </li>.
- Browsers read your code and automatically backspace if there is more than one space between characters or if the first word of a section has a leading space. To deliberately add a space between characters that will not be deleted, type . The & means you are starting a special character. NBSP means no backspace. The semicolon means you are done with the special character.
- If you edit your website yourself, but later pay Brazzell Marketing Agency to edit your website, be sure to alert us that you have edited the website yourself. Otherwise, we will likely start editing our offline source files and then overwrite your changes when uploading those files. We store the files of your website offline to work on them, which also serves as an automatic backup of any work we do on your website.
