Chapter 3: Just the Text, Ma am

After you find out how to set up a Web site and then create and organize pages, it's time to get down to the business of putting stuff on those pages. What better place to start than with text-words, letters, numbers, and characters? Text may seem rather prosaic alongside the World Wide Web's flashy graphics and interactive effects, yet text is the most important part of each page you create, because the text makes up the majority of the content. You can dazzle your visitors with cutting-edge visuals and multimedia tricks, but the content-fresh, interesting, useful information-is what keeps people coming back for more. In this chapter, you discover everything you need to know about putting text on a Web page. And while you're at it, you see the behind-the-scenes code that makes everything look the way you want.

Tools for Text

Look at the top of the Expression Web workspace. The Common toolbar contains an array of buttons for applying styles, selecting fonts and sizes, and changing the appearance of words and paragraphs. Figure 3-1 shows the text formatting buttons on the Common toolbar.

Figure 3-1: Text formatting buttons.

This collection of buttons contains the text tools you're likely to use most often-those tools for bold, italic, indenting, and lists, to name just a few. If you don't see what you're looking for on the Common toolbar, check the various dialog boxes that are accessible from the Format menu. They contain many more commands for precise text formatting. For example, if you want to customize the bullets in your bulleted list, choose Format Bullets & Numbering. (We cover these in more detail later in this chapter.)

Tip 

The Formatting toolbar contains a few more text editing buttons that aren't on the Common toolbar. Display the Formatting toolbar by choosing View Toolbars Formatting.

REMEMBER 

You can add and remove toolbar buttons and commands, so if you find yourself always digging for a text tool that's buried in a dialog box, go ahead and add it to the toolbar of your choice. We tell you how in Chapter 1.

Expression Web also includes a number of handy tools for working with words on the page:

• Spell checking: Click anywhere in your Web page and then choose Tools Spelling Spelling (or press the F7 key), and Expression Web spell checks the whole page. Choose the command while the Web Site tab or Folder List task pane is displayed, and Expression Web gives you the option of spell checking a selected page (or pages) or the entire site.

• When the Standard toolbar is showing (choose View Toolbars Standard), click the Spelling button.

• Thesaurus: Got writer's block? Select a word, and then choose Tools Thesaurus, and the built-in Expression Web Thesaurus suggests some alternatives.

• Find and Replace: The Edit Find command allows you to find a bit of text-a character, a whole word or phrase, or basically any string of characters you throw at it-in a single page, in open pages, or throughout the whole Web site. Choosing Edit Replace gives you the option of replacing that text with something else. These functions can even sift through the pages' HTML tags, which is a useful feature if you have to make sitewide changes to your HTML code, such as bringing an old page or site up to current standards. (We talk about this topic in Chapter 18, which is a downloadable bonus chapter on this book's page at http://www.dummies.com.)