Using Articles to Build Content
Thursday, August 30, 2007 - By: Laura Chan
Good information makes your website useful. Adding articles provide information and insight into not only your area, but your business. The AgentAdvantage Articles Editor also does more than provide a place to simply write about your local Chamber of Commerce, but a means to add enhanced content like forms, maps, and framed pages from other websites.
Why is writing an article is a good idea?
Adding information about your town or city to your website shows that you have the expertise necessary to help your clients make an informed decision about their relocation. Your clients want to find the perfect home, but the concept of “home” extends far beyond the structure or the property line. A buyer’s decision could hinge on their impression of the quality of life of an area.
Here’s how to create an article:
Step 1 – Open the Articles Editor in your Control Panel by clicking on Website Editor—Articles, Links and Reports—Articles Editor. From the Articles Editor window, click on the “Create New” link.
Step 2 – On this “New Article” page, complete the text boxes. Here is an explanation of each text field.
- Label – this is the text of the link to the Articles Editor generates to place in the links section of your website found at the bottom of each page.
- Article Title – this text appears at the top of the article.
- Article Header – appears in the content well of the article page.
- Keywords – Meta information used by search engines to identify and rank your page. These are also found in the Main Body Copy and Images and Search Engine Tools areas of your site.
- Description – the short piece of text appearing below your site’s link on a search engine. You can give a unique description to each article.
Step 3 - After the “Description” box, each “Paragraph” of the article receives its own editable section. “Paragraph” in this section should not be understood as a literal paragraph, but rather as a section of the article. Many paragraphs can comprise a “Paragraph.”
- Heading – you can give each paragraph its own heading.
- Paragraph
- Image – like in other areas of the Control Panel, images can be added to the body of the articles. Use the radial buttons to select how you would like the image aligned with the text.
- Text – enter the text of your article here by either entering HTML code directly into the text box, or by clicking the yellow “EDIT” button. This “EDIT” button leads to the same HTML editor used in other areas of the Control Panel.
- Document to be placed in article – you can choose to place a link to a document in your Storage Locker directly into the article text. You may wish to do this if, for example, you’ve written an article about moving, and you would like to link to a moving checklist .pdf you have stored in your Storage Locker.
- Once all of your text and selections have been entered, click the “Proceed” button to save changes.
- A completed article looks like this:
Advanced Article Usage
What if you want to add something to your site that is not just text? Add framed pages to your website using the same Articles Editor you use to make text articles.
Framing Pages from Other Sites
Sometimes you may wish to link to another website without diverting the visitor away from your site. A common instance of this scenario is when a board may give a client a search from the board’s website instead of making an IDX feed available. The board only distributes a link to their site. While you could simply add a button linking to this site, you want the data to appear as generated from your site. This is when you should use the Iframe tag within an article.
Method
We use an article for this task as “article” means “new website page” rather than simply “text article.” The Iframe HTML tag allows another URL (or web address) open within a specified portion of another webpage. Follow these steps to insert the iframe:
1. Create a new article in the Article Editor. Enter a “Label” for the article. Do not enter a Title or Header unless you would like them to appear above the framed website.
2. Directly in the “Text” box of the first paragraph insert this tag: <iframe src="http://www.samplewebaddress.com “ height=1000 width=800 frameborder=0></iframe>. Naturally, where “www.samplewebaddress.com” appears, enter the web address of the site you would like to frame. There is no need to use the yellow “EDIT” button for this task as you, and not the HTML editor, are generating your own HTML code.
3. Click the “Proceed” button at the bottom of the page to save changes.
4. Your completed article will pop up in a new window. We framed http://www.homes.com for our example. You should see the website you had framed appear within your website like the image below:
Tip: You can copy the URL from this window and use it to make a navigation button.
