ShopSite Quickstart Guide

The Main Page Now that she has everything together, Tina's going to begin building her store. Starting at the back office main menu, she clicks on "Pages". She finds that one page has already been created, the home page for her store. This will be the page named "index.html", the one that loads up by default. She selects "main page" by clicking on it, and hits the "page contents" button. A new page comes up containing spaces (fields), some blank, some filled, where information about the page can be entered and changed. Under "Name" she highlights "main page" and replaces it with the name of her store, Tina's Toys. If she had already uploaded her graphics, she could choose her logo from the pull-down menu, but since her graphics are not uploaded yet, she will add them later. We'll cover uploading image files later in this guide. In the "Text 1" section, she enters the description of her store that she would like people to see first. She tells the customer about her shop, the kinds of things she sells, and perhaps about any specials she might be having right then. Since Tina makes the changes herself, there is no limit to how often she makes changes to this text. She could give anecdotes about her children and their favorite toys: devoting each day to a different child. It encourages many online customers to return often when a store is updated regularly. And Tina is making a wise choice by choosing a personal touch. It fits well with what she's selling and will help customers identify with her. Tina doesn't know much about HTML, but she learned from the ShopSite Introduction to HTML that if she puts a <p> tag between sentences it skips a line, and a <br> tag will start a new line without skipping a line. She even put some text between the <center> and </center> tags to center it.

Click here to find out about using HTML editor software with ShopSite.

You do not need to use any HTML tags to use the ShopSite system, but we would suggest using at least the <p> and the <br> tags so that your paragraphs do not look crammed together. Remember that if you hit return at the end of the line, your Web document will not display it as such. You must use the <br> tag. If you know a lot about Web design, you can put as much text and html into a ShopSite text field as you want. You can even lay out a whole page using your favorite html editor, and cut and paste the body of it into your ShopSite document. Tina chooses not to enter anything into the Text 2 and Text 3 areas, because she wants the links to her other pages to appear under her welcome text, and she intends to make a universal footer later on containing her address, phone number and e-mail address, which will appear at the bottom of every page in her site. We'll discuss making a universal footer later in this document. For the front page, Tina leaves the "link info" section blank. If she wanted to make every page in her site link back to the main page, one way she could do that would be to write "back to main page" in the "link name" field or create a graphic that said "main page" (or had a picture of a home) and specify it as "link graphic". If she did that, then whatever she entered in this page would appear on whatever pages she selected under "link location". At this point, there are no pages listed under link location, except the main page, because she hasn't created any yet. We'll discuss making links in the next section. Under "file name" Tina sees that "index.html" is already written there. She leaves it alone. Remember, that the page called "index.html" loads by default if no page is specified. Once she is done editing the page, Tina saves her changes by clicking the "OK" button at the bottom of the page.

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