Feature Update Alert! Text Editing

Our first priority at Pagecloud is improving your building and editing experience (obviously, what else are we doing during work hours?). The latest updates to text editing are a few of many steps we’re taking to improve and evolve our editor to best fit your design needs. 

Let’s take a look at some text editing essentials

Whether you love a unique font, bold colors, or would rather keep it simple, well-placed and well-balanced text is a crucial part of web design. Our editor comes fully equipped with all the tools you need to style and format your text so it reads clearly and flows properly throughout your website. 

Never underestimate the value of aesthetically pleasing text fonts, styles, and colors. Choose fonts that support the overall tone of your website and grab your reader's attention. You can select a font from our Editing Menu or copy paste a sample of a Google Font directly onto your page.  Read more about adding fonts to your website.

Within your Editing Menu you can also experiment with size, line height, and letter spacing to maximize your text’s readability. Use the color wheel to nail down the perfect text shade that pairs with your site’s color palette and (we cannot stress this enough) is easy to see against the background. 

Lastly, text boxes allow you to easily shrink, enlarge, or play with the layout of your text to best utilize the surrounding space.  

Hot tip: Our Undo and Redo buttons are always readily available for those accidental formatting mistakes, or those “I found the perfect color and then lost it” moments. 

Now we’re making editing text easier than ever! Keep reading for more info on this feature update and how we’re striving to make your life easier.

So, what did we actually update? 

Our editor allows you to apply style to text in two ways: 

1. The inline text editing bar, which is best used to apply edits within a chunk of text and includes bold, italics, linking, etc. and, 

2. The Text section within the Editing Menu that’s best used to apply a style and format entire blocks of text. 

We’ve made several updates to each of these tools to better suit your text editing habits. 

Inline text editing updates

First off, we’ve included the B (bold) button into the font weight selection. This gives you a much greater range from light font weight (100-300), to regular (400), to heavy font weight (500-900), depending on what your chosen font can support. Defining a font weight can have a drastic impact on the overall style and tone of your text, and we want to give you as much control over your content as possible. 

We’ve also added more formatting options like Strikethrough and All Caps, allowing you to have full control over even the smallest of edits to your text. Lastly, we’ve migrated the Line Height, Letter Spacing, and Alignment functions to the Editing Menu since they’re best used when styling entire blocks of text rather than specific words within the text box. 

Editing Menu updates

Within your trusty Editing Menu there is a Style tab with a Text section. We’ve updated this section to best help you edit and format your entire text box. We’ve added the same formatting controls like Strikethrough, and All Caps as we did in the inline editing bar so you can apply these changes to the entire box when necessary. 

We’ve also given you the ability to apply Heading, Subheading, and Paragraph (default) tags to your text boxes. The Clear Formatting control has been added so you can quickly revert all text formatting back to our default settings for those times when you just need to scrap all your work and start over (don’t worry, it happens to the best of us). 

Smart Layouts, our biggest PageCloud update to date, includes a feature called Auto Columns. Auto Columns automatically organizes the content to ensure it will resize and reflow across all screen sizes. This of course includes text boxes, so we’ve added the Space Below function (also found in the Arrange section) to your Text tab so you can add a specific amount of space below your boxes.

Learn more about Smart Layouts and how these features can help elevate your designs. 

Why do these updates matter? 

These might seem like minor updates, but we can assure you these small changes will improve your text editing habits and be beneficial to your overall workflow. Editing text can be tedious and time consuming as you have to keep formatting consistent, and make sure your text is balanced against the other elements in your site. We want this task to be as smooth as possible, which is why we’ve made these updates so you can edit entire chunks of text much faster. 

We recommend using the inline text editor for text that is, well, in line. Making smaller edits to specific text within a text box such as underlining a word, adding a hyperlink, or bolding an important statement should remain reserved for the inline text editing bar. 

All other edits should be made within your Editing Menu, which, if you’re new to PageCloud you will quickly come to know as your central control panel. The Editing Menu makes it easy to apply style and formatting changes to your entire text box without having to select the text within. 

Hot tip: You can select more than one text box and edit them simultaneously with the Editing Menu. 

Editing text for mobile

Let’s not forget about editing text for mobile viewing! We know how important it is that your websites function on both desktop and mobile screens, so here are a couple tips for switching to mobile editing. 

Your mobile site will automatically inherit all text styles from the desktop version until you make an edit while in Mobile Mode. This means that if the text on the desktop version is 14px in size, the text on mobile will also be 14px in size until you make the change while in your mobile view. Once you’ve made an edit in Mobile Mode (e.g. changing the font size from 14px to 20px) that edit will override (as in, it will no longer be affected by) changes made in the desktop view. 

Another important tip for editing text for mobile viewing is to remember that “clickable” text becomes “tappable” text on a mobile screen. We’re sure you’ve probably experienced the frustration of not being able to tap something on your screen because the button is too small, so remember to make any clickable text bigger on mobile viewing so users can easily navigate your site while on their phone. 

What’s next? 

We’re always keeping creators and designers in mind as we evolve our editor. We want to continue to update the small things that can make designing faster, smoother, and more fun for you. 

Coming soon! 

The next phase in text editing will allow you to set default styles for every website you build. Rather than having to change your text's style box by box, you will be able to set heading and body text styles that include colors, fonts, arrangement, spacing, etc. This will be greatly beneficial to your overall workflow since you will waste no time manually changing each block of text, and you will have more freedom to explore and apply different styles to your text throughout your site. 

Stay tuned...

Keep an eye out for more exciting feature releases and updates, and make sure you have a peek at our blog for helpful articles on web design. Drop us a comment if there are any web design tools, features, or concepts you’d like us to write about!