Tutorial

Connecting to Carrelet

To connect to Carrelet, you need three pieces of information, which should have been given to you when you opened your account:

  1. Your entry point into Carrelet
  2. your id
  3. your password

If you do not have this information, please consult the person who opened your account. Then, using your browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Opera...), go to your entry point and click on the button near the bottom of that page labelled proceed to login page. This will take you to a form entitled Carrelet login page.

Enter your id and password, and click on log in. This should take you to another page entitled Carrelet: Control Panel.

Troubleshooting

If you get an error message when trying to log in, the most likely reason is that you have entered your username and/or password incorrectly. Here are some things to check:

If problems consist, consult the person who opened your account.

Global settings

When you log in for the first time, the only option available is 'edit global settings'. Click 'OK', and you will be taken to a page entitled Carrelet: Global Settings. This page is used to control settings that affect every page in your account. You need to complete this page in order to activate your account. You will be able to return to this page at any time if you need to change the settings.

(Note that it is important to proceed by clicking the buttons on the Carrelet pages, rather than by using the 'back' button on your browser. This is because the content of the pages changes as you work, and also because the pages are only valid for a limited amount of time. For this reason, you should also 'save' your work every ten minutes or so by clicking on modify and then returning to the page on which you were working.)

For the moment we will just set the values that are needed to activate the account:

Leave the other options as they are for now. Click on modify at the bottom of the page. If all goes well, you should be taken to a short message confirming that the account has been activated. Click on continue to return to the control panel.

Viewing your pages

Near the top of the control panel, you will see a section labelled site address, followed by the address of your web site. Click on that address, and the website will appear in a new window. You can keep this window and the window containing the control panel open at the same time, and thus see the site take shape as you work on it.

What you should see is one or more pages with some standard text as headings and menu entries. If you cannot live with the layout, colour scheme, text size or fonts that have been used, click on Edit global settings again and choose different values. Click on 'reload' in your browser to see the changes.

Important note

Your browser will not display changes to your website unless you explicitly tell it to. This is because Carrelet produces what are known as static pages, ie it writes web pages the same way as a human author. There are many advantages to this approach, but your browser generally expects static pages to be just that, so it saves a copy in its local memory (known as the page cache), and when you return to the page it shows you that copy rather than the latest version.

So when you are creating a website, you need to clear the page cache in order to see the new page. In most cases, clicking on 'reload', either on the tool bar or in one of the menus, will do the trick. If not (probably because of the way your browser is configured), try holding down the control key and clicking 'reload'. If that doesn't work either, try closing the browser and restarting it. If none of these options work, check that the pages have changed on someone else's computer, and then ask your local technical support how to reconfigure your page cache.

Adding a logo

At the moment each of the pages of your website probably includes a rather dull grey box containing the word 'logo'. This is where your logo is supposed to go.

The first thing to do is to get your logo into your computer in a suitable format. Carrelet will accept files in the following formats:

Most scanner software can produce files in at least one of these formats.

Once you have the right sort of file, go to the Carrelet control panel, find the row that says Upload image file called ... for all pages ('logo') and click on the button labelled something like browse in the middle of that row. Your browser should open a window showing files on your hard disc. Move around until you find your logo file, select it, then click 'open'. In the control panel, click on OK at the end of the appropriate row.

If all goes well, there should be a pause while your logo is uploaded, and then you should get a message to say that the logo has been updated. Reload one of the pages of your website to see what it looks like.

You can change the logo at any time by repeating this process.

Potential problems

Editing a page

To put some text on the first page, go to the Carrelet control panel, find the row that says edit page 1 and click on go. You will be taken to a page entitled Carrelet: Configure page 1.

There is quite a lot on this page, but, for now, stick to the most important sections.

Leave the other settings as they are, click on modify, and you should get a short message saying that the page has been updated. Click on continue to return to the control panel.

Formatting text

On the last page, we saw how to enter a block of text. This method is very simple, but the resulting page can look a bit dull, especially if the block of text is on the long side. The solution to this is to use the formatted text feature. Choose Edit page 1 again, and select Formatted text from the menu in the section Treat body text as. Then add formatting commands to the body text and click on modify to update the page as before.

Carrelet's text formatting language is one of its most powerful and versatile features. It is fully documented in the user manual. Here we will just look at some of the more commonly used commands.

To insert a main heading, you type 1+ at the beginning of a paragraph. In other words,

1+Here is the largest sort of heading

produces

Here is the largest sort of heading

There are six possible heading sizes, which can be inserted using 2+, 3+ etc.

To centre a paragraph, type = as the first character. right-justified paragraphs start with > eg

=some centred text

produces

some centred text

To put text in bold, enclose it in square brackets. It put text in italics, enclose it in curly brackets. Thus

[Now] is the {time}

is displayed as

Now is the time

Finally, in case you are wondering how we managed to display the control codes on this page, a backslash \ tells Carrelet not to treat the next character as a formatting command. So

\3+Example

will display

3+Example

rather than

Example

You can also use formatted text to insert images and flash boxes and lay out tables.

Feel free to experiment: the worst that will happen is that the formatting commands get displayed on the website as 'normal' text.

Working with images

There are two stages to adding images to your web pages with Carrelet:

  1. You add the image to the image library
  2. You tell Carrelet to use the image on a particular page

Adding an image to the library

Go to the Carrelet control panel and find the row that says Add image to library. Click on go, and you will be directed to a page of that name.

The Image target tells Carrelet which library you wish to add your image to. Carrelet offers one library per account, plus a shared library for all accounts under a particular domain name. If in doubt, choose 'this account'. The shared account is provided for big projects where the same image may be used in different places on the site, and where the webmasters may wish to be able to search for images of a particular type.

The next line (File containing image) is where you select the image that you wish to upload, much as you did when uploading the logo (Haz clic aquí).

The Caption is a short description of the image. It is intended to help you identify the image in the library at a later date, and can also optionally be displayed under the image when you place it on a web page.

The other settings provide further information about the image. The standard values should be useful in most circumstances. Change them as necessary and click on the modify button at the bottom of the page. You should receive a short message as normal, which will tell you the number that has been assigned to your image.

Viewing your image in the library

Return to the Carrelet control panel and locate the row near the top of the page labelled Image Library. Click on this account or shared, depending where you chose to put your image. This will open a new window containing the image library search page. Click on submit, and you should see the caption you typed in next to the number of your image. You can display a small version of the image instead by changing the display setting. The other options will help you to search for particular images when you have several to choose from. Click on the number of the image or the image itself, and you will see a larger version of your image and the information you entered about it.

Displaying the image at the top of your web page

Remember the number of the image and return to the Carrelet control panel (it should still be open on your screen). Select Edit page 1 as before ((Haz clic aquí)). Find the row entitled Image at top of page. The current value is probably 0, which means 'no image'. Type in the number of your image. Set image source to the library where the image is stored. You can also set the size of the image, and choose whether or not the caption is displayed. Click on modify at the bottom of your page, reload page 1 as before (Haz clic aquí) and the image should duly appear at the top of the page.

It is possible to add more than one image, and to place them anywhere in the document, but this is a little more complex: see the relevant section of the user manual for further details.

Email forms and guest books

Carrelet can add an email form or a guest book to any page. An email form enables anyone to send you an email, without publishing your email address on the Internet, and whether or not they are using their own computer. A guestbook allows people to make comments on your site, and can also be used as the basis of a simple 'blog'-type site, where people discuss whatever you put on the page.

Go to Edit page 1, and find the row labelled add. There are two check boxes, for email forms and guest books respectively. Tick one or the other and then click 'modify' at the bottom of the page. Reload page 1, and you will see a form at the bottom of page 1.

Note that only the forms themselves are produced: you need to explain what visitors are supposed to do in the text you enter into body text.

The information typed into the email form will be sent to the email address you specified in the global settings (Haz clic aquí). Carrelet provides various tools for managing guest books: please see the user manual for more details.