Hey Cupid, Need a Hand?

Envision a person declaring their love with a website on Valentine's day. Maybe it's you! A clever video and a series of blog entries on "let me count the ways" would demonstrate deep, abiding love, right? 

Perhaps even pop the question!

On second thought, some things might be better left to bended knee. The point is: be it business or entirely personal, the same techniques apply regardless of the content involved in the website you want to create. Incorporating a video and making a blog are two of the most common features applied to all manners of websites. 

Read our short short guide to adding a YouTube Object and a Blog to learn how to use two Sandvox features we really ♥, whether your website topic is all-business, or not.


YouTube Object Spotlight: Marry Me

To illustrate the lengths some will go to to propose marriage, and show you how to add a YouTube video to your website, we've included a link to a romantic YouTube video that made us a little …well, see what it does to you….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_v7QrIW0zY

Put a YouTube Object on your site

Start out with an empty Sandvox document, or perhaps the website you already have in progress. In the Site Navigator, select your Home Page. From the "New" toolbar item, select the Empty/Text menu item to add a new page to your site.  Double-click the text "Untitled" in the Site Navigator (or on the page itself) and type the words “Marry Me Video”.

youtube-icon

Next, select the YouTube item from the Objects toolbar item.

If you had the video already playing in your web browser, Sandvox may have already figured out which video to show on the page. If not, you can drag-and-drop the link for the YouTube video mentioned above onto the gray placeholder where it says “Drag YouTube video URL here.”

You just added a YouTube video!

Blog Spotlight: How do I love Thee?  Let me count the ways.

blog-icon

Next we'll start a blog, each entry addressing one thing you appreciate about your honey. 

Choose the Home Page again from the Site Navigator. From the "New" toolbar item, choose Blog.

Note: The Blog item is a container that gives structure to several pages, as a collection, and presents them in reverse chronological order. As such, once the Blog is created, to add new entries (such as your second entry), the process is similar to adding a New/Empty page, which you may already be familiar with. In this case, Blog should be selected in the Site Navigator instead of Home Page when adding new pages to the collection. But let’s start our blog by editing the first entry which was automatically created for you.

Select the “First Post” title text, and replace it with a new title for the post, such as “The first time I met you”. Then select the placeholder text and replace it with "The first time I met you, I knew you would be an important person in my life."

If you wanted to include a photo with your post, you would choose the Media toolbar item. Navigate into the appropriate folder to get the photo you wish to insert, then drag-and-drop that photo onto the blog entry text. If desired, you can then resize and reposition the photo to the right, the left, or center.

Next, to create a second post, select the Blog item in the Site Navigator, then choose Empty/Text from the "New" toolbar item. Note how, in the Site Navigator, the newly-created page is nested inside the blog.

Add a title for the second post, like "Our First Date" and then, add the content for your second blog entry—which might be a description of where you went on your first date, what you thought and how it made you feel.

tweet-icon

Let's say your little website, indeed, proposed marriage. You might want to give your honey the opportunity to announce the good news via Twitter. Adding a Tweet button is fairly straightforward. In the Site Navigator, select your main blog page. From the "Objects" item in the toolbar, select the Tweet Button. The tweet button will appear on the blog, and every nested page in your blog.

You just created a blog, populated it with two posts, and even added a “tweet” button so your visitors can share your site with their Twitter followers.

Not bad, eh? We  Sandvox too!

Happy Valentine's Day!