Legacy Marketing Services

Quick Tips on Formatting Emails with Web Based WYSIWYG Editors

Carla Alvarez — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:44:17 +0000

If you have a business web site on a content management system (CMS) like Joomla or WordPress, chances are that you have extended the platform with some sort of email functionality. Or maybe you are also operating a CRM or ecommerce site and have a feature to send notices to customers and clients.

If so and you are also using a WYSIWYG editor to create content on your site, you may run into a problem.

WYSIWYG stands for “what you see is what you get.” Rather than having to code in HTML to create the content for your web pages, a WYSIWYG editor displays formatting icons to make formatting web content just as easy as if you were typing in Microsoft Word. The majority of web platforms today either come with or have extensions to add a WYSIWYG editor for users.

However, WYSIWYG’s will also manipulate your text, such as cleaning up improperly formatted HTML elements (helpful,) stripping style elements (not always so helpful,) and setting the paths for inserted images and links.

Most editors can be configured to set either absolute or relative paths for images and urls.

An absolute url is one where the entire url is included, for example http://legacymarketingservices.com/file/images/cutepic.png. The problem with this method is that it make your content very easy to be scraped and republished on other web sites, resulting not only in the theft of your content, but the bandwidth as well.

Because of this, many webmasters use relative url’s in the content in which the base domain is left out (for example /file/images/cutepic.png.) If an article and it’s corresponding images were republished on another web site, the images would not display since obviously they are not stored on the copycat’s server.

HTML Emails and WYSIWYG Editors

Relative urls and WYSIWYG’s are great for web content, the problem comes in with the HTML email.

If you want to create a pretty HTML email with images and links, those pictures must be uploaded and stored on your server and then the images must be linked to with absolute urls where most editors are configured to convert them to relative.

Are you beginning to see the dilemma?

You are probably saying to yourself, “Well I can just enter the absolute urls manually.” The problem is that the editor will automatically convert them anyway.

For example, let’s say I want to put a link in an HTML email to my events page at http://legacymarketingservices.com/events. The editor would strip that down to /events. Again, not a problem in a web page; however, if it is put in an email without the base domain included the reader would end up with a “page not found error.”

So how do you get around this issue without giving up the convenience of an editor

The Email Solution

Here is the fix. The editor is configured to work with the base domain of your site configuration. Any time it sees a link that includes that exact domain, it will parse the url.

If your configuration is set to http://www.yourdomain.com, then manually enter the link as http://yourdomain.com (no www.) If your configuration is set to http://yourdomain.com, do the opposite and manually enter the link at http://www.yourdomain.com.

The links will still resolve to the same page, but the editor will view it as a difference domain and will leave it as is.

Last Minute 4th of July Marketing Ideas for Your Business

Carla Alvarez — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 05:36:04 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Over the past few days, I have seen a huge surge in traffic from people searching for marketing ideas for the 4th of July. They found the post I wrote last year on marketing at 4th of July events.

If you are still looking for marketing ideas just a few days before the 4th, I thought you might need a little help. This video gives a few fast ideas for putting something together to promote your business.

Marketing Handouts

Obviously you are not going to have enough time to get something professionally printed. Hopefully you are stocked up on business cards, Yes? Other ideas are flyers and postcards.

FedEx Kinko’s is your friend for last minute printing. While they do allow you to upload your file and pick up the printed pieces later, if you need a really fast turnaround, take it in and run the copies yourself. Office Depot and Office Max are other good resources for last minute printing.

If you want something a little sturdier, one option is to set-up a 4″ x 6″ postcard design, save it has a high resolution image (at least 600 dpi) and send it to a one hour photo place like Walmart, Walgreens, or CVS. If you are running several hundred of the same photo, they might not be able to do a one hour turnaround, but it will still be faster than most anything else.

4th of July Themed Handouts

Run to the store and stock up on some 4th of July fun:

Sparklers
Snap Pops
Ice Pops
Balloons
Glow Sticks
Water Bottles

Self adhesive labels are a procrastinator’s best friend. Go pick up a pack of Avery labels in a size that will fit the item you are handing out. Labels come in a wide range of sizes from mini return address labels to full 8 1/2″ x 11. Whatever you are planning on handing out, you can find a label the right size to slap on it.

MS Publisher has preset templates for almost every label size out there. Load a template, add clipart and your company information and print the label sheets.

Promotional Candy Items

If you can’t think of something creative to pass out, candy is always favorite. Once again, self adhesive labels can save the day by creating a fast and easy promotional wrap around a candy bar, either full size or mini.

Another option are bags of candy with a promotional topper. Craft bags can be found at stores like Hobby Lobby or Michaels, 2″ x 3″ or 3″ x 4″ are good sizes to go with. Put a few pieces of candy in the bag and staple your business card to the top.

Tips for Next Year

The 4th of July, like the hurricane season (if you live in the Gulf Coast,) comes every year . . . so be prepared! Plan ahead of time what events you want to promote your business at and have your promotional items on hand.

I will be release a marketing course called the “Exhibitor’s Edge” covering every thing you need to know to market your business at trade shows and community events, as well as how to turn the contacts made into long term customers. Sign up for my newsletter for more details.

Make Your Email Lists & Newsletters More Social with Aweber and Facebook Integration

Carla Alvarez — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:21:24 +0000

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve used a quite a few different email newsletter and list services over the past several years. Aweber is the email service I am setting up the majority of my new lists on.

I originally started with Aweber because of how easy it is to set up sequential emails or news lists, otherwise known as autoresponders. What I love is how detailed and granular their statistics are. Seriously, their stats are on steriods.

When I logged in today to set up a new list, I saw that they have expanded their broadcast notification system. The option has been available to notify Twitter for awhile, now you can post a notification on your Facebook page as well.

This allows Aweber users to notify three sets of contacts with the publication of one email blast: email subscribers, Twitter followers and Facebook fans.

Converting Browsers into Buyers Video

Carla Alvarez — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 05:25:19 +0000

Our Web Site to Web Sales seminar earlier this month had a very active discussion. As a result, we didn’t get to cover the last part of the information. Below is a video covering the information for seminar attendees. If you attended the seminar and didn’t receive a password, please contact me.

If you missed the seminar and would like to catch the recap, an online version of the seminar will be available in May. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates.

Promoting Merchant Circle Reviews on Facebook and Twitter

Carla Alvarez — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:49:14 +0000

I’ve had an account on Merchant Circle for Legacy Marketing for awhile but other than filling out my company details, I haven’t focused much on promoting it. However I got a very nice review from a client, wanted to show it off, and I started to research the ways to integrate the Merchant Circle accounts with other web 2.0 sites.

Although there is a “Facebook Connect” option for Merchant Circle, it appears that it is just for personal profiles. Either that or it didn’t sync with my Merchant Circle account because my Merchant Circle business account is tied to a business email address and my Facebook account is tied to my personal email address.

Since I want the Merchant Circle reviews and coupons to post to my Legacy Marketing business fan page and not my personal account wall, I scrapped that option.

I started to look for an alternate Merchant Circle application, when the light bulb went off . . .

RSS!

Sure enough, my MC business page had it’s own RSS feed. From there, it was a snap. (Are you wondering what is RSS? Read this article on what RSS is and how to use it.)

Adding Merchant Circle Reviews to Facebook

I’ve used several different Facebook applications to post RSS feeds to my wall and/or fan page such as Networked Blogs and Blog RSS Feed Reader; however, they can be a little tricky to configure to post only to your fan page wall or to both your personal and fan page wall. I found a newer application called RSS Graffiti that has a much easier interface to have granular control over your RSS feed’s postings.

After installing the RSS Grafitti application, you can set whether you want to give the application permission to your personal page and fan pages on an individual basis. Multiple feeds can be added and you can add prefixes or unique titles to the feed postings. You can also track the url clicks through your bit.ly account, which I think is a really cool feature.

As I already had the application installed on my fan page, it took a total of 3 minutes add the review feed.

Adding Merchant Circle Reviews to Twitter

Twitter integration is becoming de rigueur for social networking sites and I’m a little surprised that it isn’t a default feature for a Merchant Account business profile. Even so, there are other tools that make it easy to add to Twitter using the RSS feed.

There are several services out there which will post an RSS feed to twitter; however, my favorite is Twitterfeed. Every new review or post on your RSS feed can be displayed on your Twitter account within minutes with just a few simple steps.

Sign up for an account at Twitterfeed
Click “create a new feed.”
Name the RSS feed and enter your feed url, click test.
Click “Continue to Step 2.”
Click “Twitter” under the services option.
Click “Authenticate Twitter Account.”
After you have allowed Twitterfeed to access your Twitter account, the integration is complete.

Now every time a customer posts a review or you post a coupon or a blog, it will be displayed on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. The caveat to this method is that you must be committed to excellent customer service. If you repeatedly get customer complaints and have unhappy customers, you may want to think twice before setting this up.

If you’re thinking, “That sounds great, but all this tech stuff makes my eyes cross,” don’t worry! That’s what we’re here for. Contact us regarding our social media promotion options.

If after reading this you are inspired to take your site or business promotion to new heights with RSS, Sean Donahoe (an RSS marketing fiend) just came out with a online seminar called “RSS Master Class.” It is a limited offering and I haven’t checked the availability lately, but if it is still open, I would jump on it.

What is WordPress MU?

Carla Alvarez — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 21:35:56 +0000

As a web site developer, I make a habit of trying out different CMS and ecommerce platforms so I can counsel clients on the best option for their business. But my favorite standby’s are Joomla and WordPress.

Many people are familiar with the standard self-hosted version of WordPress (available for download at WordPress.org) and the hosted version at WordPress.com. However, not as many people are familiar with WordPress Multi User (commonly referred to as WordPress MU or WPMU,) which is a shame because it blasts the possibilities open for publishing multiple and collaborative sites.

What is WordPress MU

Again and again on various forums I read common misconceptions about the WordPress MU platform. Many people believe that it can only be used for sites that provide users blogs on a subdomain such as WordPress.com does (username.wordpress.com.)

It can do that, but that is not the only way it can be used. It can also be used to run separate sites on their own domain. For example, let’s say you have a thing about scrapbooking and you want to create several sites for the different forms of scrapbooking. So you buy the domains creative-scrapbooking.com, digital-scrapbooking.com, and wedding-scrapbooks.com.

(This is just an example and I’m just throwing them out there. I have no idea if they are available or how competitive or how good the keywords are.)

Next, you go to your hosting account and install WordPress MU using one of the domains for the base install. You then go to the WPMU administration panel to add the second and third sites. You now have three separate sites with unique domain names on one installation of WPMU.

http://creative-scrapbooking.com
http://digital-scrapbooking.com
http://wedding-scrapbooks.com

Each site will have it’s own administration area that can be accessed by going to http://domain.com/wp-admin/. Each site can have it’s own unique theme, different plugins can be used on each, and additional users can be added to one or all of the sites.

Now let’s say your friend Mary is a wedding photographer and wants to blog about wedding photos and creating a photo list for shots that will work well in scrapbooks. You can create a subdomain on the wedding-scrapbooks.com site, photos.wedding-scrapbook.com, and add her as a user to that blog. Mary will have access to her own admin panel for photos.wedding-scrapbooks.com but not to the main site, wedding-scrapbooks.com or either of the other two domains that are on that WordPress MU platform. Pretty cool isn’t it?

So now you have three sites with a total of four “blogs.”

http://creative-scrapbooking.com
http://digital-scrapbook.com
http://wedding-scrapbooks.com
http://photos.wedding-scrapbooks.com

WordPress MU can be used for multiple sites and multiple subdomains with blogs at the same time.

Why Use WordPress MU?

So why use WPMU rather than multiple installations of the standard version of WordPress?

The main reason is that it makes updates extremely easy. If you have three, thirty or three hundred sites on individual WordPress installs, even though WordPress is very easy to keep updated, it still takes time to go through all the installations to update the platform and the plugins. With WPMU, you only have one platform and one set of plugins to update.

It also saves a huge amount of time when setting up your site. There are a number of programs out there that automate WordPress installations, but with WordPress MU, after redirecting your new domain, it is a three minute process to add a new site. Also, you don’t have to install plugins again. They are already installed and just have to be activated for that particular site.

The same is true of themes. Multiple themes can be available on the WPMU installation and you can specify which themes are available to each blog. When installing themes on a WPMU installation, remember that one theme may be used on a number of different sites. So it is better to go with themes that have a theme administration panel for features that need to be unique to a particular site rather than having them hard coded in the theme itself.

Is WPMU for Me?

If you are planning on having more than one web site on WordPress MU, I think that it makes sense. However, in the next major update of the WordPress platform, 3.0, the WordPress and WPMU projects will be merged and every installation of WordPress will have multi site and multi user capabilities.

If you are just now starting out with online publishing, I would frame your site and content strategy based on a multi site portal.

Posts in WordPress MU for Online Publishing

What is WordPress MU?

Google’s April Fools Joke

Carla Alvarez — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:13:47 +0000

Today Google users had a little shock to their system with a new look and new name on Google’s home page. Rather than the familiar “Google,” the name “Topeka” was prominently displayed.

A little confusing without the back story. At first, I didn’t make the connection to April Fool’s day. I was thinking, “Is this supposed to be a cool spelling for Topica? As in search for topics?”

The official Google blog had an explanation:

Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.

Topeka’s name change is Mayor Bill Bunten’s attempt to spotlight the city of Topeka as a contender for Google’s “Fiber for Communities” project. Google plans to install ultra fast broadband networks in up to 50,000 communities in an experimental project that will deliver connections at up to 1 gigabit per second.

Bunten is not a huge techie himself; however, he does realize the vital role the internet plays in business and commerce. He sees the project as a way to ensure the continued growth and economic vitality of Topeka for the upcoming generations.

The submission period has ended. The project page displays a map of communities that applied. The response was overwhelming and staff at Google noted:

If one message has come through loud and clear, it’s this: people across the country are hungry for better and faster Internet access.

No kidding! I wish someone would tell Suddenlink that. For the past month, I have been battling dropped connections and dial-up level speeds even though I pay through the nose for the highest internet package available. Do you know how long it takes to upload graphic files for print at that level? It’s a nightmare. Since Hurricane Ike, the internet connection has been horrible and our electricity goes out every time a squirrel sneezes.

That 1 gigabit transfer per second would almost be enough reason alone to relocate.

It will be interesting to see if Bunten’s stunt pays off. Personally, I think it would be a shame not to reward that creativity.

Local Bloggers Network at Inaugural Bloggers’ Breakfast

Carla Alvarez — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 03:32:40 +0000

Today we had our first “Blogger’s Breakfast” here in Kingwood. I planned on pictures, but I walked out of the house without my camera.

Since working with quite a few online publishers and bloggers locally, I thought it would be fun to have a monthly get together to exchange tips and ideas. Before planning the event, I asked a friend of mine, Sahnya Shulterbrant, if she would be willing to cohost the event with me. I met Sahnya when she called needing some updates and modifications to her Joomla based site. As we have a lot of similar interests, that project led to a friendship. She and her husband, Gene, publish TexasontheGo.com which provide information and opportunities for doing business in Texas. They were recently recognized by the City of Austin for their efforts.

Besides Sahnya and Gene, Matt Russell with MTR Financial and Ellen Delap, a professional organizer, also attended. Both Matt and Ellen have written articles for me for the Kingwood Connection so I was familiar with their writing. I knew that Matt had a blog, but I didn’t know that Ellen had added one to her site as well until today.

Blogging Platforms and SEO

It was interesting that we had people using each of the three main blogging platforms. Sahnya and Gene use Joomla, Matt is on Blogger/Blogspot, and Ellen uses WordPress. I have sites on both Joomla and WordPress.

One of the things we touched on is SEO optimization for blogs and/or database driven sites. There is a widespread belief that if you use a content management system (CMS) or blogging platform that you don’t have as much control over SEO elements and are at a disadvantage. This is just not the case. Think about what those key SEO elements are: a unique page title, a title meta tag, a meta description, and meta keywords. There is no reason that a database driven web site can’t populate that data, it is just that most of the time a stock install doesn’t.

The easy answer to this issue is to make sure that your platform is set up to allow you to enter that information. Most people are familiar with the All-in-One SEO pack for WordPress that allows you to specify the title, description and keywords on a page or post basis. It is one of my stock plugins that I install on every single WordPress site I develop.

Not as many people are familiar with how to do the same for Joomla. I’m going to tell you my secret for developing search engine friendly Joomla sites . . . SEF Patch from Joomla-at-Work.com.

This component is even better than the All-in-One SEO pack for WordPress. Not only does it allow you to set the article title, description and keywords, but it also let’s you set the author meta tag and the robots index/follow setting for the page (you can do this with WordPress as well, but it’s a separate plugin.) It also adds the option in the site global configuration for the default description and keywords.

So far, all this is pretty similar to the WordPress plugin, but here is where it starts to pull away. If you have used a Joomla site before, you know that everything hinges around the menus. What is displayed is determined by the menu item’s settings. The SEF Patch ads the ability to set the meta information for any menu item, excluding an individual article link. So if you link to a category page, normally this would have the default meta information (WordPress does this as well,) but this component allows you to specify unique meta information including the page title. This has a huge impact on your site’s search engine rankings.

Trust me on this. There is quite a bit of competition for my Kingwood site, but if someone submits an article or press release to my site as well as the two other online community sites and newspaper sites, my site will rank #1 in Google for searches related to that article 75% of the time. Most of the time with a double listing. It just takes a site that is properly configured and some basic SEO tactics.

How much is this component? It is ridiculously inexpensive. There is even a free version, although you have to hack the core files to install it. The paid version is an actual component that you install through the standard Joomla installer. It is only € 14, so around $20 to $21 depending on what the U.S. dollar is doing. Compare that to what you would spend on a pay per click campaign if you can’t get your sites to rank organically.

We are going to hold the Bloggers’ Breakfast the first Wednesday of each month. So if you are in the Kingwood area, check the Facebook page for the next date. If you’re in the Greater Houston area, we would love for you to come. I promise we don’t bite.

If you don’t have a blog yet and aren’t sure where to start, contact me to start your blogging journey.

5 Tips for Protecting Your Business Domain Name

Carla Alvarez — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:06:21 +0000

One thing that I frequently spend quite a bit of time on with new clients is issues with their domain name . If someone needs a domain name , I refer them to GoDaddy . Sometimes if they absolutely don’t want to mess with domain registration or if I know that they won’t keep the registration current, I will manage it for them and just bill them later.

While many web developmentcompanies resell domain registration along with hosting and web design, that is just not something that I have wanted to delve into for two main reasons. First, we are just talking about a margin of a couple of dollars a year and unless you are doing a high volume, it’s just not worth it.

The second reason, and the most important one, is that when someone buys a service through me, they expect me to be able to fix it if they have a problem. If there is an issue with their web site, I can handle it. If it is a problem with their hosting or email, I can make sure that it is fixed.

However if I resold domain registrations and someone let their domain name expire or had their domain unlocked and the nameservers were transferred, there is literally nothing I can do about it. The last thing I want to do is put my company in a situation where a client has an expectation that I can fix their problem and my hands are tied. Those couple of dollars a year (see above) just aren’t worth it.

I have written post after post about this, but I can’t say strongly enough how important it is for you to protect your business domain name . If you had a phone number for years and it had been in all your advertising and your clients had it in their phone directories, what do you think would happen if suddenly one day that phone number started directing calls to a competitor? What do you think that would do to your business?

That is exactly what can happen if you let your domain name expire or lose control of your domain.

Here again are a few tips for protecting your domain name :

Keep Your Contact Information Current

The registrant information on file at your registrar should ALWAYS be kept current and make sure emails from your registrar don’t get sent to your SPAM filter. Every registrar will send you reminder emails 60 to 90 days before the domain expires.

Keep Your Domain Locked

Your domain registrar should have a feature to “lock” your domain name to prevent transfers. If it is unlocked and someone submits a transfer request, you will have to deny that request or it will automatically be transferred. If you aren’t paying attention to emails related to your domain name or if your email isn’t current, you will have a big problem on your hands.

This should be a standard feature, you shouldn’t have to pay extra for it.

Keep your Domain Registration Independent from Your Hosting

You should never get into a situation where your domain registration is tied into your hosting. Some registrars, like GoDaddy and Network Solutions, do also offer hosting; however, one isn’t conditional on the other. For example with GoDaddy , you can register a domain, add hosting to it, and then if you later wanted to cancel the hosting you would still have the domain and be able to use it on another hosting account. (This article explains the basics of a web site and how domains, hosting, and web pages work together.)

You should be able to direct your domain name to point to any hosting service, and if you can’t then run.

I have spent hours over the past week trying to help someone who had signed up for a new hosting service with another company. That new company not only transferred the web site files, but also their domain names to a new registrar. Normally that wouldn’t be an issue, except for that the registrar it was transferred to is a wholesaler and the only way the site owner can manage the domain name is through the hosting AND the hosting company only allows the domain to be pointed to their own hosting service . . . essentially locking the site owner into their hosting unless they switch registrars once again. Which brings me to the next point . . .

Plan Any Domain Registrar Changes Carefully

If you plan to switch registrars, (say for example, from DirectNic to GoDaddy ), make sure that transfer is absolutely what you want to do. If you switch registrars or change the registrant information, you can’t switch again for 60 days. When I bought a domain from an auction on SnapNames, I couldn’t transfer it over to my GoDaddy account for 60 days. In the situation I mentioned above, the site owner is literally stuck on hosting where his site won’t function because the hosting service that the domain management is tied into won’t allow a change of nameservers and he can’t change to a registrar that would allow him that capability for another 60 days.

Never EVER Let Your Domain Expire

Let me repeat that.

Never, EVER let your domain expire.

This is a big, BIG deal. Some people think that if you let your domain expire that you can just go back and reregister it. NO. That is not the case . . . as in a great big NO.

If you let your domain expire, this is what happens. Most registrars will give you a grace period, it’s different for each one, maybe 5 days to a week. During the grace period, you may experience an interruption in your domain direction but you can renew as you normally would.However, there have been a couple of times that I have had an eye on a domain name and the registrar put it into expired status immediately.

After that grace period, it will go into a redemption period. This time frame varies by registrar. During the redemption period, you can still renew or “redeem” your domain name ; however, it will cost you a redemption fee in addition to your renewal fee to do so. The amount varies by registrar, I’ve heard between $75 to $150.

After the redemption period, the domain goes into “pending delete” status. At that point, you can’t get it back prior to the domain dropping and it will sit there until the domain is deleted from the registry record.

Once the domain registration “drops,” it will become available and there is an entire industry around picking up dropped domains. Trust me, it is highly unlikely that you as an individual will be able to beat a domainer in reregistering a dropped domain that has any search engine credibility at all.

What will most likely happen is that the domain will be picked up by one of these companies and held. They will either make their money back by putting up Adsense sites on the domain and getting money from the click throughs from visitors coming to find you, or they will sell the domain back to you at a premium. At the point, you will have to pay whatever they ask to get it back.

So again . . . don’t let your domain expire.

Yes, they are cheap and because of that many people don’t place much importance on them. However, your business’s domain name has much greater value than the $10 a year it takes to keep the registration current. The longer you have that domain and the more prominence you build in the search engines, the greater that value becomes.

Don’t lose that value in one fell swoop over carelessness.

Importing Word Content to Joomla or WordPress

Carla Alvarez — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:18:16 +0000

Many people use Microsoft Word to create content and articles, after all, it is a word processing program.

However, problems arise when they want to import that content into a web page. If you’ve never looked at HTML source code for a site, you may not know the difference . . . but trust me . . . anything that comes out of Word is a mess when it gets to the web.

Not only does it clutter up and slow down your site with unnecessary code, but the garbage code can also break your site’s design layout. I recently received a support request for a client because a section on her site was messed up. The client had posted a new article, pasting the content from Word, and a mangled site was the result. I had to go into the article itself and strip out all the Microsoft tags to get it to work.

Pasting from Word

You should never copy and paste content from Word directly into your content management system. The WYSIWYG editors for WordPress and most of them for Joomla have a “Paste from Word” icon feature.

Copy your content from Word.
Click the “Paste from Word” icon and a dialog box will appear.
Paste your content into the dialog box and hit save.

This will normally strip all the Microsoft junk code from your content. However, some editors have configuration settings for what gets stripped and what doesn’t. If that is the case (such as with the JCE editor for Joomla), you may need to test the settings until you get just the right combination.

With any content management system (CMS), you platform theme is going to contain a stylesheet that specifies what each element of your site should look like, resulting in a cohesive look. You do not want font and style tags in your content, because that will override the theme settings.

Fast and Easy with Dreamweaver

If you have a copy of Dreamweaver, my favorite way to prepare content for the web is by pasting the Word content into a blank HTML file in design view. It usually does a pretty good job of converting the format to properly structured paragraphs. Then I copy that and paste it directly into the WYSIWYG content editor in the CMS.

Final Tips

If you have a site with a layout that was fine but is suddenly out of whack, check first your most recently added content. Look for any extraneous tags. That will most likely be the culprit.