Online Editing Tools
Many web hosts provide online editing tools to help you make changes to your site. You will be given a login username and password which you use to access a special web page. From there, follow the instructions to make changes to your web pages.
Pros:
- Relatively simple to learn and use
- Usually very cheap or free with your hosting plan
- Doesn't require any special software - just your internet browser
- You can login and make changes from any computer
Cons:
- Much more limited than specialist software
- Tends to be more dangerous and problematic
- Slower to work with
- You need to be online the whole time you are working on the site
For most websites, online editing tools are less desirable than using a specialist software package. Still, in many cases this option is perfectly adequate, especially if you only need to make occasional minor updates.
Example: CPanel
CPanel (www.cpanel.net
) is a common website management system, included with many hosting plans.
CPanel provides a whole range of tools, one of which is the File Manager - an online web page editing tool. The File Manager allows you to create or upload new files, and edit them using either a WYSIWYG editor or hand-coding the HTML.
The screenshot on the right shows the WYSIWG editor. To get to this editor, open the page you want to edit in the File Manager (in this case the page is MediaCollege.com's home page). A toolbar appears above the page, and you can edit the text on the page directly. When you have finished making your changes, simply click the Save button and the page is updated.
To learn more about how this tool works, visit www.cpanel.net/docs/cp, click How do I use CPanel? then File Manager.
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