|
SmallBusiness.com:Tutorial (Formatting)
| Introduction | Editing | Formatting | SmallBusiness.com links | Citing sources | Talk pages | Keep in mind | Registration | Wrap-up |
Formatting SmallBusiness.com articles is a bit different from writing on a standard word processor or even designing a website using HTML (although, as you'll learn below, there are times when HTML can be used). We use the same open-source software created by a worldwide community of developers on which Wikipedia is run. Instead of a "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) approach, a wiki like Wikipedia or SmallBusiness.com uses text codes to create particular elements of the page (e.g. headings). This "language" is known as Wikitext (or Wiki-markup) and is designed for ease of editing. (Although, we confess, the word "ease" is not always the first word that comes to mind when you're first learning how to use it.
Here are some of basic of Wikitext that you can use to format your entries or edits.
Bold and italics
The most commonly used wiki tags are bold and italics. Bolding and italicizing are done by surrounding a word or phrase with multiple apostrophes ('):
| You type | You get |
| ''italic'' | italic |
|
'''bold''' |
bold |
|
'''''bold italic''''' |
bold italic |
On SmallBusiness.com, the names of an article's subject are written in bold when they are first mentioned in the article. For example, the article Marketing begins:
- "In business, marketing the ways in which products or services are conceived, designed, priced, promoted, packaged and merchandised..."
Italics may be used for the names of books, movies, albums, and computer/video game titles. If the first mention of the subject of an article is also a book or movie title then bold italics is used.
For more information about when to use bold and italics, see SmallBusiness.com:Manual of style.
Headings and subheadings
Headings and subheadings are an easy way to improve the organization of an article. If you can see two or more distinct topics being discussed, you can break up the article by inserting a heading for each section.
Headings can be created like this:
| You type | You get |
|
==Heading== |
Heading |
|
===Subheading=== |
Subheading |
Note: If an article has at least four headings, a table of contents will automatically be generated.
HTML
Wikitext contains all the features required to follow SmallBusiness.com's formatting conventions and knowledge of HTML code is not necessary, although it is often used for more specific formatting such as using colors, text and paragraph styles, and page layout.
