Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Global setting of the time zone

Maybe you know this yourself: You have a guestbook, a shout box, time information, news and many more, and you need to decide on the time display for all of these elements. From now on you can centrally manage the time settings with page4. The following possibilities are available in the “Advanced” tab in “General Settings”:




Simply select your desired time zone (more than 300 zones available) and all settings will be centrally managed. Quick and simple. From now on this function is available to all of our users. Why don’t you log on immediately, go to “General Settings” and choose your personal time zone with a simple click. Save, go. I wish everything was that simple.

Kind regards, Manfred

Monday, October 18, 2010

The perfect browser for editing your website

Unfortunately there are standards available in the area of HMTL and CSS, however not all of these standards are supported by every browser, they rather go separate ways. Therefore it is impossible to adapt a complex application such as page4 to all browsers.

These browsers are especially suitable for editing your website and for perfectly supporting all functions:

Operating system Windows XP, Vista and 7
Firefox 3.x
Safari 4.x and 5.x
Internet Explorer 7 and 8

Operating system Mac OS X
Firefox 3.x
Safari 4.x and 5.x
Camino 2.x

We extensively test all of our tools with the above browsers. Since this is very complex we might oversee issues while testing. Therefore we are always happy about feedback. If you discover a problem, please test a second browser by all means to see whether the problem is dependent on the browser. Then you should inform our support so that we can find a solution. Thanks a lot for your help.

If you are using other browsers such as Chrome, Opera, Flock or Advant, please note that we cannot always assure that all functions can be used without any problems.

IMPORTANT: If your browser has problems with linking text passages with the new editor, select the text, then click on the right mouse button for the extra menu and select “Insert/edit link”. This procedure should also work with browsers that cannot cope with normal linking. If you are linking to external websites in this way, please enter the complete address incl. http://. If you are linking internal sites, please only enter backslash (/ = shift+7) and either the site ID (/80.html) or the alias name, if you are using one (/aliasname.html), each with the ending “.html” in the respective field.



Thursday, October 14, 2010

Publish Word documents online?

Does it make sense to create documents, e.g. tables, in Word and to then transfer them to a website by simply copying the content into a text editor used for developing texts for websites? We don’t think so because it means copying an extreme amount of code into your website which increases loading times and will lead to display errors, in particular with different browsers.

Take a look at the following example:


This simple table











Transferred to our new editor which then removes all unnecessary code results in the following HMTL code:


This is a largely clean code that will not cause any trouble.

This is what the code would look like if you kept everything from Word. You won’t see how many commands and instructions there will be included in your website unless you examine your site in the source code. Then it will look like this:




I think this speaks for itself and does not need to be explained. However, hear me out. In the Word code you will find many commands that do not comply with the HTML standard at all, as well as a great amount of format information. Now imagine how extensive the implemented code will be if you create a complex table. By the way, creating a normal text from Word will also result in a voluminous code which bears no relation to the content. At first the result may seem appealing but you can expect that every browser will display the content in a different way, some will show weird control characters and some browsers will disrupt the whole design because the dimensions of your Word document lead to unexpected reactions with the HTML code of the design template. This is not caused by our or other design kits, it’s due to the fact that Word is not able (and not developed to) create a clean HTML code.


We can only recommend not incorporating formatted Word documents into your website. Take advantage of our new editor and directly format your documents with the page4 tools. This may seem like a bit more work but it will spare you from a great amount of surprises. I hope this small example will help you to create even better websites with page4. We are happy about any suggestion, comment, criticism as well as error or problem messages. In order to help us publish that kind of information and to support us, please tell us your name, the website you created with page4 as well as the website you need help with. Since this blog cannot really be used as a support forum it would be best to use our support form or our forum where you will receive quick and competent help.

Monday, October 11, 2010

I’m happy you found us.

Are you are already using page4, the modern design kit for great websites? Then you are in exactly the right place as, from now on, we will publish all of our news on your favourite tool in this blog. You will immediately see whether there is anything new when you log onto your website.
If you using a different web design kit or CMS, we are happy that you are visiting us. Hopefully you will find inspiration for your site since we don’t only want to report about page4, but gradually provide general information on creating websites. Maybe you will feel like looking over the edge and testing a new system? Great, simply click on the banner at the end of the blog and get your free version. It is completely without risk, we only need your email address and the desired name of your new page. Then you can start.
You don’t yet have your own website but you would like to start one soon? Perfect. Maybe this blog will help you to find the right system. The easiest way is to try it out. Simply acquire a free website and get started, without any side effects. However, if the provider requests considerably more than your email address and a name to access your new website, you should make sure that you read the general terms and conditions to be on the safe side. We don’t want you to order something that your provider wants money for.

Enough of words, let’s bring the blog to life.

Enjoy reading and trying it out.

Manfred F. Schreyer
page4 team