Building up your pages

 » View Hi, I'm an aside « 

Sections and asides

Pages in BanksyMS have a fairly constrained structure. This is designed to achieve two things:

  1. To keep things simple enough that you don't need to know much about html to create and edit nice looking pages.
  2. To more or less force you to make pages that are consistent with html 5 design principles.
All pages start with a top level heading. Below that they are divided into sections. A section covers a particular topic and should usually start with a sub heading. Actually, this very piece of page content is a section titled 'Sections and asides'. In addition to sections there are also things called asides. There is an aside on this page as an example. These are outside the main flow of content and (to emphasise this) appear at the side of the page. When the page is viewed on a narrow device (e.g. on a phone), the asides are collapsed to link boxes as shown in the aside, but can be viewed by clicking on the link in the box. The remaining elements you can add to pages are pictures (technically figures). 

Adding sections and asides

Clicking the icon adds a new section at the bottom of your document. Clicking the icon adds a new aside at the bottom of your document. You can then move the section or aside to the place where you want it to appear using the icon.

Building up to something great

When you are create a new page, the first thing you will want to do is edit the main heading. The main heading need not be exactly the same as the menu title (ut it is likely to be similar). Once the main heading is done, you can start adding sections (and asides, if you need them). When you add a section or aside, it will already have a dummy heading. You might like to map out your page structure by first adding the sections you think you will need and editing their headings, before adding content to them. Or maybe you are the kind of person who likes to add content to sections as you created them. Either way, when you are ready to start adding in content items, the icons in the edit menu for each section (or aside) will show you the kind of content items you can add. Most obvious are paragraphs ( icon), but you can also add pictures ( icon) and tables ( icon). You can also use the icon to add further headings to a section (although this might suggest you should really be adding a new section). On the other hand, adding further headings to an aside often makes good sense.

You will typically want to have several paragraphs in your sections. There are two ways to create multiple paragraphs:

  1. In an edtior, you can do paragraphing by pressing return multiple times.
  2. You can add multiple paragraphs by using the icon.
So which is best? Well, from the pint of view of creationg good html, the second method the icon is definitely best, so you are encourages to do things that way.