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Work Around for SiteBuilder Editing

The simplified template approach used by SiteBuilder is intended to make editing easy for people who don't want to worry about html and css. But when drag and drop causes centered pages look jerky and page formats are difficult to standardize, there are a couple of work arounds.

If you leave page hugging the left, most of the centering issues are moot. The left edge of the page stable, and since the nav bar is fixed on all pages, you only have to worry about getting the logo in the same absolute position. To use the image context menu, select the image, right click, select properties/coordinates, and make the image X & Y positions the same on all pages. (The eye can see a dislocation of 1 pixel.)

If your page is centered, you can create a visual helper;

  • Take a screen capture of your favorite page.
  • Pull it into an image editor.
  • Leave the logo and nav bar visible, but define text areas with blocks of light color, leaving margins and gutters a different shade.
  • Define the right most "edge" of the page with a vertical line. Line it up with the right most item in the page, whether text block, right edge of the image furthest to the right, logo, or footer content.
  • In SiteBuilder, notice how far the nav bar sits from the left edge of the editing screen.
  • Crop the edited screen capture's left edge to match the position of the nav bar as it sits in Sitebuilder.
  • Save the image

Pull the resulting image into SiteBuilder as a page background. The page logo and nav bar should overlay those in the background. If not, adjust the background until the positions do match.

If you don't have the grid showing, make it show. Using the grid, and the background image to judge distances, you can standardize your page positions.

Titles should be on the same line, gutters should be the same width, and and text should end at the same position relative to the "right" edge.

Delete the background before you publish.

If the drag and drop operations didn't allow you to move around text boxes, title locations, logo position and other components from page to page, the background "shadow template" image would not be helpful. If with movable page components, if you want them to be consistent site wide, you need a visual guide that isn't affected by the drag and drop.

Guides can help, and they do have a "snap to" command, but for some users, "snap to" causes more problems than it solves.