Headlines and body copy

Of all the things we're going to talk about, this is probably the simplest, but, even so, nothing in the engenu world is completely simple.

The headline

A headline is just a headline, right? Not quite.

The first time you enter an engenu page (that is to say, a particular folder), engenu will inherit the headline from the name of the folder. What's the implication? If you name your folders the way you want them, your headlines will come to you for free.

The ideal way to name a folder is with underbars_for_word_spaces. engenu will convert those to true word spaces in the headline, but the URLs resulting from your folder names will be easy for human beings to read. Even so, search engines will interpret your underbars as word spaces, so everybody wins.

But no matter how your folder is named, you can edit the headline to say anything you want. Your headline will be saved that way from then on -- until you edit it again.

Your headline will also be used as the title tag for that particular web page. Search engines associate a high degree of relevance to pages with keyword rich headlines and title tags, so this is one of many ways that engenu effects sound Search Engine Optimization.

There is one other way to think about the headline. If you enter a folder that has sub-folders stored within it, engenu will create the sidebar links using the following inheritance logic:

If you have already edited the title of a sidebar link, engenu uses that text
If you have already edited the headline in a subfolder, engenu inherits the sub-folder's headline as the sidebar link
Finally, engenu will default to the name of the subfolder as the title of the sidebar link

Of course, you can edit the title of any sidebar link whenever you want, and you can edit the headlines of subfolders. The point of this inheritance logic is to maximize your time.

Like this:

If you have set up your folder names just the way you want them, you can inherit those names with no additional effort. If you want to use the folder names as your sidebar links but use richer headlines in the subfolders, all you have to do is edit "down," working from the higher-level folders before you do the lower-level folders. But if you want to inherit your subfolder headlines as sidebar links, rather than the names of those subfolders, edit "up" -- starting with the lower-level folders and working your way upward.

The way to think of things is that folder names and headlines inherit "upward. " And if you think specifying a direction for inheritance is a little odd, wait just one second.

The supplemental title tag

In addition to the title tag, you can have a supplemental title tag -- and it inherits downward...

The supplemental title tag is a way of clarifying structural ideas for human beings while influencing search engine results. On these pages, the supplemental title tag is " | Home of engenu - because the language of real estate is photography". No matter what the headline/title of that page is, that supplemental title tag will follow it.

You can specify a different supplemental title tag for each web page simply by typing into the supplemental title tag text box.

But wait. There's more.

The supplemental title tag inherits downward. If you enter an engenu page for the first time, engenu will try to inherit the supplemental title tag from higher levels.

It will look first in the level immediately above the current folder -- if there is one.

If it doesn't find a supplemental title tag one level up, it will look in the top level of its own hierarchy -- if it isn't already there.

If engenu doesn't find a supplemental title tag there, it will look in the folder called "engenuComponents" at the top level of your file server. The engenuComponents folder is where the "skin" for your particular implementation of engenu is stored, so the "master" copy of the supplemental title tag is stored there.

And if there isn't a copy of the supplemental title tag in the engenuComponents folder, engenu simply creates an empty supplemental title tag and uses that.

But whatever form the supplemental title tag takes, it will inherit downward into previously-unedited folders from that level down in the hierarchy.

Do you see how this works? If you have a supplemental title tag you want to use for everything, just store t in the engenuComponents folder. It will be inherited into each new page as you enter it for the first time.

But if you want to use the supplemental title tag as a way of internally organizing a large hierarchy of folders, just create the supplemental title tags you want, giving them the filename "titleSupp.php" and then dropping them into the folders you want to display that particular supplemental title tag.

If a particular supplemental title tag will apply to an entire sub-hierarchy of folders, you can put it into the top level of that sub-hierarchy and then edit downward level-by-level to inherit that supplemental title tag into each sub-folder as you enter it for the first time.

The body copy

And guess what? The body copy portion of engenu really is simple. You can type any valid HTML or PHP code into this space, but if you want to just type away like you would in a weblog post, go right ahead, engenu will come in behind you when you Save the page to add line-breaks at the ends of blank lines -- just like a weblog editor.

Even though engenu is optimized for creating slide-shows, you can build any sort of web page you want using the body copy section of the editor. This page is an example of how that can work: Everything you are seeing here is being typed into the body copy section of the page, and we're ignoring the slide-show feature entirely.

Here's the best news: Whatever body copy you choose to use, it doesn't inherit at all, not up, not down and not sideways.