The Whisper Tools ™ Authoring Module offers a variety of resources for rapidly putting together and modifying web pages. What ever you are doing with your website, this is the module you will probably spend the most time working in. It is part of the basic Whisper Tools package (along with Core and Photos).
Authoring a page is really very simple, in essence. It's putting together the content for the page as you want it to appear to visitors to your web site. In reality, putting together a web page can be complicated, but only because there is a wealth of tools and resource that may be drawn on to make web pages dance and sing according to your tune. Text, HTML, javascript, PHP or .NET / .ASP coding, server-side and client-side architecture, style sheets, sound effects, pictures, flash, videos, fonts, colors, background images, custom cursors, links to other pages or to other areas in the same page, email links, download links, PDF documents, and on, and on...
So many choices. Such a wealth of possibilities. So overwhelming. Where do you start? In general, the best place to start, always, is with what you are trying to say. The actual text, statement or shout you want to make. After that, pretty it up with pictures, color, fancy backgrounds, and such. That is, start from the center and work your way out.
That said, there are complications to how to design a web page. Much (and much times much) can be said about the subject. One good resource, and there are many others, is webdesign.about.com. The author publishes a regular newsletter with helpful resources, suggestions and tutorials about web design. Also, with practice many of the basic principals will become apparent over time.
Authoring Of course, you have to be able to enter and edit your page content. Whisper Tools allows you to first create a page, with things like a name for the page, a title, various meta tag settings (optional) and so forth. Once the page has been entered into the system (very fast process), you can then edit it, using either of two different editors: plain text and "wysiwyg" (What you see if what you get), the latter being mainly for use if you're not handy with typing HTML directly. It provides a nice way to work with HTML with out really getting your hands that dirty. From here, it's just a matter of typing, much like in any other document editor.
Snippets One of the tools in the authoring module is "snippets" or library pieces of text, code, HTML, what ever that you can keep in a handy library and embed in your page(s) with a simple reference. For example, say you have a piece of text that you want to use in maybe seven different pages. Why type it seven times? Or what if you want to change it later; why have to change it in seven different places? So, in your page text you can use the following token: {{snippet:my-snippet}} and the content of that snippet (what ever you created there) will be included when the web page is seen by your visitors.
Snippets also has editors, plain and wysiwyg, and it's easy to quickly build a library of bits and pieces to use in your pages over and over, and to change quickly from just one location. Short version: snippets are extremely useful.
Templates Templates are an important idea, though not necessarily instantly obviously, if you've never worked with them before. Let's say that you want all the pages on your website to have a similar structure / look-and-feel. A header, a footer, a right-hand sidebar, and so forth. But then what if you want to change the look-and-feel for all your web pages? You did not have a footer on them, perhaps, and you want to add one. Or you wish to add a left-hand sidebar just temporarily to the pages in your website, maybe for a holiday or other special time. Templates lets you do all this. When you create a page (see "authoring" above) one of the things you can specify is the template that the page uses. The Whisper Tools comes with a variety of basic templates already made out for you. Others are very easy to create for special needs, if you know basic HTML. So, if you have several pages all based on the same template, and you modify that template, then all those pages will then display in the new lay out.