Use Tokens When Importing or Building Pages in XSitePro

- by Andrea Wilson

Tokens in your XSite Pro templates work just like subway tokens or casino tokens. They substitute for "the real thing." In the case of subway or casino tokens, the "real thing" is money. In the case of XSite Pro tokens, the "real thing" is the filename, title, keyword, link, graphic, description, etc. that will be used on your Web pages in place of the token.

Tokens make importing articles or product pages into XSite Pro easy and simple. Here's how it works...

Let's say you have a Web site about pillows and you want to put a generic introductory sentence or side-bar on all your product pages. Instead of having to re-write the sentence for each of your products (back pillows, reading pillows, baby pillows, tempur pedic pillows, etc.), you can create a generic sentence, e.g., "Please take a look at our great offers on X."

You then simply paste the sentence in the "Top HTML" box when importing your HTML product pages. (Other > Import Pages)

Tip: You could do the same thing when importing a group of articles.

Once pasted, simply highlight "X" and click "Insert Token" at the bottom of the screen. Choose "This page" then "Keyword 1," or whatever is appropriate for your project. "X" will be replaced by a token. And when you publish your pages, the token will be replaced by the first keyword on the list of keywords for that page. When you look at your pages online, they will read, "Please take a look at our great offers on back pillows," "Please take a look at our great offers on reading pillows," etc.

We can also mix and match tokens. For example, we could say, "Please take a look at our great offers on X and then check out our full catalog of Y." The token we replace "X" with might represent a keyword from our nested product page, but the token we replace "Y" with represent a keyword from our parent (or category) page. So, it could read, "Please take a look at our great offers on organic cotton baby pillows and check out our full catalog of baby pillows."

There are other tokens in XSite Pro, too. For instance when you want to create a parent page that has a list of links to all its nested pages, you insert a token as follows:

• place your cursor where you want the links to appear on your page
• right click and choose "Insert Links to All Subpages"
• choose "Bulleted List" or "Numbered List"
• choose "Links Only" or "With Descriptions."

If you chose Bulleted List > With Descriptions your published parent page will now show a bulleted list of links that includes a snippet of text. These snippets will be from the description (on the Info tab) of each of the nested pages. These snippets help your visitor choose which link to click on and entice them deeper into your site. They also add good keywords to your parent page. By the way, XSite Pro will update these links and snippets automatically as you add pages to your Web site!

Tip: See my tip for changing the links in the list to blue instead of the default black!

Tokens are powerful tools that automate your Web design and make your content more consistent and easier to update. When you're preparing your Web site, first put all your HTML articles or product pages together into one directory. That way you won't miss the chance to automate your site building process by using tokens, along with the equally powerful "Import Pages" feature in XSite Pro.