Creating New Content

With the Drupal CMS that we’ve integrated into your site, you have the ability to create new content. Once you’ve logged into your site you’ll notice that a new vertical navigation menu will appear. Choose ‘Create content’. After that choose the ‘Page’ option.

Once you do this, the first option that you’ll have is to ‘Title’ your new page. Be sure to make the title reflect the content as completely as possible for ease of navigation and also page titles can also be helpful in giving you better search engine results if you name your pages based on your top keywords. The first title option will go at the top of the content area of your page. If you choose to also fill out the ‘Page Title’ field just below, then you’ll actually be creating the text that will be seen at the very top of your browser bar. For example if you look at the top of your browser now, you should see the text “How To Create A New Page in Drupal”. This additional text can be quite helpful for SEO. For more info on how to make a search engine friendly website you may want to read Search Engine Copywriting Tips in our blog.

The next field down is the ‘Body’ field. This is where you can add/adapt your text for this page. Be sure to use the rich-text option. For most installs this will be the ‘WYSIWYG‘ editor choice which you should see in the ‘input format’ section just below the body field. Rich text is probably the most convenient and quickest method to input your page content (unless you have a decent knowledge of HTML or Textile). Here, you can use bold, italics, add links and format the body. (Refer to the section Using the Rich Text Editor for further information on editing).

If you want the page to be available within an already existing category, click on Menu Settings settings after you are finished typing your content. You can then choose a Title for your page as it will appear on the menu, and a mouseover description also. Here, you will see a drop-down menu called ‘Parent Item‘. This will allow you to select where you want this new page to live on your site.

Figure 2: Menu Settings

‘Weight‘ simply refers to the placement of your new page within the category. If you have no real preference, leave the default option at 0. The lower the number, the higher it will be placed in the order.

Don’t be afraid to explore the menus on this page. Any item that is preceded with a symbol can be expanded to show more options. For example, you can attach a file to your page, or go as far as adding meta-tags (providing a hidden description for the web page). Search engines (such as Google or Yahoo!) can direct users to your site.