To work in your blog navigate to your Principals Blog > About Us > Our School > Principal's Messages, don't forget you need to be in the secure (edit) view. To create a post, choose that from the menu on the left:

 

Title (Required)

Add a title (concise, descriptive, unique). Remember that it should fit into the space you have available in the Principal's Messages zone on your home page.

 

Body (Required)

The content of your post goes into the body. If you've composed your post in another application (like Microsoft Word), there are a few different ways you can add this information to your blog. 

1. Use the Paste Plain Text button. If you fail to do this, when you publish the post, you will get strange characters appearing on your front page of the site. 

   
   

   

2. Copy from Word into a plain-text editor like Notepad (PC) or Text Editor (Mac), then to copy that to post into the web editor so you don't have leftover formatting and styles from Word. 
3. Type your message directly into the body 

 

To format your text:

1. Select the text you want to work with
2. Choose the format using the Markup Styles dropdown so that the font and colour will match the rest of your website

 

Note that the formatting controls only appear in the ribbon when you have selected the editing (body) field. If you don't see them, try clicking in the field again. 

Don’t use the manual formatting tools (like font, text size, colour, and so on) or the Styles button. They will make it much more difficult to make your content match up with the rest of your site. 

After Publishing your Message, check your home page to see how it looks. If it looks like this:

Then that means you skipped the step about pasting it into Notepad or Text Editor and pasted it directly from Word. Try again.

Links (Optional)

To link your text to another page in your website or an external website, highlight the word or phrase you’d like to link, then, in the Editing Tools choose to insert a link from an internet address:

 
In the pop-up dialog box, add the full address (ensuring that if you’re linking to a page in your site you use the public "http" address for the page, and not the secure "https" address) and then click OK:

 

You can use the link tools to open the link in a new tab (do this when you link to a page outside of your school site), to modify the link, or to remove it entirely:

 

Images (Optional)

Select Insert in the Editing Tools ribbon:

 

Choose to add a picture from your computer or an online image:

Note that, unlike in other content pages in your website, the blog tool will not automatically manage the dimensions and file size of your image as you upload it, so it’s important to save your image appropriately before going further with this step (a JPEG with a maximum width of 800 pixels and 80% quality is a good place to start).

After you choose the image, you have an opportunity to change the name or add a description if you would like. When you’re ready, click Save (or Cancel to quit without saving it):

The picture will be inserted into your blog post. Unlike the content editor in most pages in your website, it’s not possible to resize the image by dragging the edges with your mouse, but you can use the Picture Tools in the ribbon to resize or position it:

Tables (Not Recommended)

If you need to use a table in your post, you can choose the number of rows/columns and insert it using the Editing Tools:

To ensure that content can be viewed on a mobile device, limit your table to 2 columns if possible. In general, the blog display is not as versatile as the other pages in your site, and may not scale correctly on mobile devices, so avoid using tables in your blog if you can.

If you add a table, you can modify it by using the Table Tools:

Category (Optional)

You can add a category for your post, but it's not required.

Published Date (Optional)

The published date will default to today (usually what you want); set it in the past if you don’t want the post you’re working on to be displayed as the most recent, or in the future if you don’t want it to be published until a later date. 

Save as Draft, Cancel, or Publish (Required)

The action buttons at the top of the screen (in the ribbon) and at the bottom of the editor do the same thing:

You can:

• Save as Draft if you want to work on your post more before you publish it (it won't be visible to the public)
• If you're ready for the world to see it, Publish
• If it doesn't seem to be quite as good an idea once you see it written down, Cancel to close the post editor window without saving your changes. And don't worry - we've all been there.