Copy and Paste is a great way to make your life easier, but beware of these pitfalls.

Copy and Paste is a great way to make your life easier, but beware of these pitfalls.

Copying from word, excel or outlook

Although you can, only do this in small doses (a paragraph or less at a time).  All Microsoft products will copy a tonne of hidden formatting information into your page.  This might not seem like a problem now, but if you do this regularly you will find your pages are slow to load for your users, for you while editing and for search engines (perhaps negatively affecting your search engine ranking). 

But worse, your formatting may look completely different on other browsers.  You might also find very strange things happening when you attempt to add or edit the pasted text.

Using the new V5 editor, you there are two options in the toolbar, paste as plain text or paste from word. The paste from word will maintain most of the report formating functions like bullet points and headings and paragraphs, but will strip out fonts and colours. Paste as plain text makes it easier to start with really clean content.

Using V4 editor, the best solution is to copy and paste your text into Notepad first (From your desktop - Start >Programs > Accessories > Notepad Editor) then copy and paste from there into our content management system. This will remove all your special formatting, but this is necessary. You should then use our tool bar to restyle your headings and important text. You can globally change your styles in the design settings area.

Following these simple rules will make your website much easier to read, more search engine friendly, will have more uniform results on different browsers and much much easier to manage.

Copying from other pages

Try to avoid copying text from other pages in the content management system. The page editors often embed some special functions which you don't want to copy from page to page. If you want to copy from page to page, then please use the View button to view the live version of a page, then copy and paste only the bits you want.

Copying images/photos from other websites

Yes you can do this, however it works randomly. Sometimes it will copy the full reference to the image, meaning the actual image is still on the original website, and your page is only looking at that image. Sometimes it copies a local reference to the image, which means that you will get a broken image symbol.

The correct way to copy an image from another website (subject to copyright issues) is to right click on the image, and save image as a file to your computer, then upload the image using the "insert picture" wizard option.

Copying images from your computer or from word.

If you copy and paste from your computer or word, it can be a bit hard to work out why sometimes it works, and more often it doesn't. What usually happens is that your website makes a local reference to the photo on your own computer, which means that it looks like it works, and it does on your computer, but for anyone anywhere else on the internet, they won't be able to see your photo, which is still situated on your computer and not on the website.

The solution, is to use the Photos button image wizard to upload your photo file onto our server and then to insert this image into your website.

Copy and pasting from Dreamweaver or other website or HTML editing software

You can do this. Its best to copy and paste the HTML source code into the HTML tab area. This will give you the best result. You will still need to fix up any local HREF or SRC urls..