✐Aurora Hive Live for beginners

A pen on your own website: you click on a text, change it and save. Done.

There is no program to open, no administration area you would have to learn, and no second view that looks different from the website. You work on the page your customers see.

It is meant for everyone who occasionally corrects something: changed opening hours, a typo, a new contact person, a price.

Anyone who builds a website does not work with Aurora Hive Live — that is what Aurora Hive Sites is for.

The person who looks after your website has given you a link, a user name and a password.

1. Open the link. You land on your website.
2. Enter your name and password. Both belong to you alone — there is no shared password for everyone.
3. A pen appears — usually at the bottom right.

From now on you are in editing mode. Nothing changes for visitors; only you see the pen.

If no pen appears: reload the page once (the F5 key or the circular arrow in the browser). If it is still missing after that, the link is wrong — ask the person who gave it to you.

Three steps:

1. Click on the text you want to change. It gets a frame.
2. Write. As in a text field — type, delete, correct.
3. Save. The button appears as soon as you have changed something.

That is all. There is no fourth step and nothing to confirm.

If you change your mind: click next to the text without saving. Then everything stays as it had been.

Start with something unimportant — a word in a paragraph far down the page. Change it, save, look at it, change it back. After that you know how it works, and nothing has happened.

No — at least nothing that could not be put right in a minute.

Aurora Hive Live lets you only change texts and images that have been released for it. You cannot:

• delete pages,
• change the design,
• rearrange the menu,
• touch anything technical.

The only mistake you can make is a wrong text — and you change it back just as you changed it.

What you should still bear in mind: a change is public immediately. Read it once before you save.

The same again, only correctly: click on it, write the right text, save.

That is not a stopgap but the intended way. There is no history and no back symbol — there is only the current text, and you decide what it says.

If you no longer remember the old wording: ask the person who looks after the website. They can usually look up what it said before.

The trick that prevents this: before you change a longer text, select it, copy it (Ctrl + C) and paste it somewhere — into an email to yourself, into a word processor. It takes five seconds.

Then it has not been released for editing — that is intentional and usually a good thing.

Typically not clickable are:

• Menu items and the labels of the navigation.
• Legal notice (Impressum) and privacy notice. They are generated from stored details.
• Automatically generated areas such as event lists or post overviews. Their content comes from elsewhere.
• Everything that is part of the design — colours, fonts, spacing.

If you need to change something in one of these places, contact the person who looks after the website. That is not a detour but the right way: these places affect the whole site.

Yes, where it has been released: click on the image, choose a new one, save.

What to look out for:

• Landscape rather than portrait. Most spots on a website are wider than they are high; a portrait mobile phone photo gets cropped.
• Not too small. An image that came from an email or was saved from a social network is often too small and turns out blurred.
• May I use the image? Your own photos: yes. Images from the internet: no.

If people can be recognised in it, you need their consent — including staff.

Like any other text: click on it, change it, save.

Two things hardly anyone thinks of:

• Opening hours often appear in two places — on the contact page and down in the footer. Check both.
• The entry in the map service is a third place, and it is the one most people see first. Change it at the same time.

For company holidays and temporary changes there is a better way than changing the text: a notice right at the top that can be set for a period and then disappears by itself. Ask about it if you need this regularly.

In most places, yes — a small bar appears with the usual options: bold, italic, list, link.

Use them sparingly:

• Bold for single words, not whole paragraphs. If everything is bold, nothing stands out.
• Lists for lists. Not to create spacing.
• Links only if they lead somewhere that exists. Check them after saving.

What you should not do: paste text from Word. Word brings invisible formatting with it that looks wrong on a website. Paste as plain text instead — usually with Ctrl + Shift + V.

Immediately. There is no second step and no approval.

That is the difference from larger systems, and it is intended: Aurora Hive Live is meant for quick corrections. Anyone who had to save first and then publish would forget one or the other.

What follows from this:

• Read before you save. Once all the way through, aloud if possible.
• Check afterwards. Reload the page and look at what it says now.
• For important things: have someone proofread it before you save.

If you still see the old version even though you saved: reload the page with Ctrl + Shift + R.

Yes, as many as you like. You stay in editing mode until you end it.

A tip from practice: save after each place, not at the end. If something happens in between — the browser hangs, someone comes in, the battery is flat — everything is gone otherwise.

And do not change too much at once. After the fifth paragraph your attention slips, and that is exactly when the typo arises that nobody finds later.

If you want to revise a whole page, Aurora Hive Live is not the right tool. Let the person who looks after the website know.

With “Stop editing” or “Sign out” — the pen disappears, and the page is an ordinary website again.

Do this when you have finished, especially on a computer that others also use. Otherwise someone could accidentally change a text that is none of their business.

If you simply close the window, nothing has happened either — your saved changes are saved, everything else is discarded.

For safety: your account is not meant to be passed on. If someone else is to make changes, have a separate account created for them.

Contact the person who gave you the account — they can set a new one. Nobody can tell you your old one; it is not stored in readable form anywhere.

You also need a new password if you have mistyped it five times: your account is then locked for a quarter of an hour. Simply wait, or have a new one set.

You can change it yourself at any time — in editing mode under “User accounts”. It must have at least 12 characters.

And a few words about the password, because this is about your public website:

• Do not pass it on. Not even to the colleague who “just quickly” wants to change something. They get their own.
• Not the same as elsewhere. If another service is hacked, your website would otherwise be affected too.
• Not on a note stuck to the screen. In a password manager, or at least somewhere not everyone can see.

If you suspect that someone else knows your password: have it changed immediately.

For small corrections, yes — a word, a number, a time. The pen is there, and tapping works.

For anything longer: better on a computer. On a mobile phone, tapping the right spot is fiddly, and a longer text on the on-screen keyboard rarely turns out well.

What works particularly well on a mobile phone: checking. Look at your page there after you have changed something on the computer. More than half of your visitors come from mobile phones — what looks wrong there is seen by most of them.

The person or agency that looks after your website. They gave you the account and can do everything you cannot.

What you should put in such a request so that it gets answered quickly:

1. On which page (ideally copy the address from the address bar).
2. Which text you wanted to change.
3. What happened — “the pen does not appear”, “saving never comes back”.
4. A screenshot, if possible.

What you can try yourself beforehand: reload the page with Ctrl + Shift + R. That explains a large share of all cases.

Everything that is no longer correct, and nothing else. A website does not need to be changed regularly.

The things that actually go out of date:

• Opening hours and availability.
• Prices, if you state any.
• Contact persons and team.
• Services you no longer offer — or new ones.
• Years such as “for over 20 years”.

Take twenty minutes twice a year and go through the pages. That is the entire upkeep of a normal company website.

What you do not have to do: reword the home page because it feels “worn out”. Your visitors are seeing it for the first time.

In many places there is a button that makes a suggestion. It is meant as a rough draft, not a finished text: read it, strike out the generic parts, put in the specifics from your business.

If you want to work without a suggestion, a simple trick helps: write it down the way you would say it to a customer on the phone. Then strike out the filler words. What remains is usually better than anything you can wring out of yourself at a desk.

And a warning about the suggestions: they occasionally invent facts — years, awards, certificates. Check every statement that looks like a fact.

Report it — in a way that makes it easy to find:

• Where exactly? The address of the page and an indication of where on the page (“third section”, “below the images”).
• What is wrong? And, if you know, what would be right.
• How urgent? A wrong phone number is something different from a missing comma.

Collect smaller things and report them together. Five emails over two days cost more time than one list.

And feel free to report things that just seem odd to you. Whoever built the site is the worst at spotting its mistakes — just as with your own text.