Creating Text

If you have used a word processor like Word Pad or Word, you should find this stage easy. When you did your planning, you thought about what your web page was going to be about, and how you were going to say it. Now you type in the text. I have started to make a page about my holiday. You can see it here:

screen shot of web page showing main heading, sub heading and text

Changing the Appearance of your Text

When you learned how to make a heading, you learned that you could change the colour and font of your heading. You can do the same with text. If you like you can make each word different!

Most of the time it is best to choose a font and a colour for a whole page, but sometimes you will want to make changes to emphasise a word or phrase, or simply to add a bit of variety.

You can also change the appearance of text by making some words bold or by using italics. It is also possible to underline text, but this is not such a good idea, because when people see underlining on a web page, they think they can click on it to move to another page. If you click here you will be taken back to the first page of this guide where you will see more underlining. To get back to this page, either press the back button on your browser tool bar or click on the link to "Writing Text".

This is called hypertext and hyperlinks. Click here if you would like to know more about hypertext.

To make these changes to the appearance of your text, either click on the button on the format bar for the text style of your choice before typing, or select your text after you have typed it and click on the appropriate style button. Don't forget to look at your work in Navigator.

Lists

Sometimes you don't want to write sentences, but what you want to say is better as a list with numbers or bullets. Again this is very easy to do in Composer. For a numbered list, click the button with numbers on it on the format bar, and for bullets, click on the button with bullets. Composer will automatically give you the next number, or bullet, each time you press 'return' on your keyboard. When you have finished your list, simply click the button on the format bar to cancel it.

Try it out!

Open Composer and the page you have begun to work in. Type in some text, and format it in the styles and colours of your choice. Don't forget to save your work and to look at it in Navigator to make sure it looks how you want it to.

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