A Content Creator’s Guide to Document Authoring with Edge Delivery Services. Part 1

Introduction

This is a content creator's guide to Document Authoring with Edge Delivery Services.

This tutorial will guide you through creating a page that Edge Delivery Services will understand and publish on the web without you having to know anything technical.

We'll cover adding images, formatting text, creating links and adding metadata.

We will start with a simple image. Later we will turn this into a ‘hero’ image to really grab a reader’s attention but first…

Add an image

Open a new Google or Word doc and insert an image:

Add some text

Type (or copy and paste) the words around the image, highlight them and choose their size under the Styles dropdown:

Choose Heading 1 for the main page heading, then decorate using Heading 2 and Heading 3 as a hierarchy. Title should be used only for metadata to give the best page structure for search engines - more about this later.

Format the text

You can make text bold, italic, underlined or add bullet points or numbering using the menu at the top of the Google doc or Word:

Different options for text alignment are not available in this version, nor are colours, highlighting or other fonts (except Courier for code, but more of that later).

Create and remove links

If you’d like to link to another webpage, highlight the text you want to link from, click the link icon in the menu, paste in the web address and click 'Apply'.

To remove a link, just highlight it and click the remove link icon:

Add metadata

Finally, and importantly, you need to add some metadata so search engines can understand your page, unless you want it to remain private.

First, create a table using Insert in the menu. Five rows and two columns are enough:

The top row only needs one column, so highlight the whole top row, right click and ‘merge cells’:

Type the following words into the left-hand column. This column is not case sensitive so it doesn’t matter about using capital letters:

Now fill in the right-hand column. This is case-sensitive.

Title

The title of a web page is what appears at the top of the browser window and in search engine results.

Description

This briefly gives further information about the page's contents, with keywords to help search engines categorise the page.

Image

Take a screenshot of the top of your page. This will show up on websites and social media that link to your page.

Author

Self-explanatory. Big yourself up for all the work you’ve put in!

If you follow this guide, you will have a page similar to this example page.

Next time we’ll add a hero image, an index and a back-to-top link to help readers navigate the page.

If you’d like to know more about using Edge Delivery Services, read Tom’s

A Developer’s Guide to Document Authoring with Edge Delivery Services

and

A Manager’s Guide to Document Authoring with Edge Delivery Services