Left-hand column is not editable!?!

I've created a site using the "Artist" layout.
In the resulting html pages, only the main area is editable.
The content of the left-hand column of each page is fixed --- its content is defined in the TEMPLATE ("H2 leftColum1 Title", followed by Lorem ipsum, etc.) and it's impossible to change that content in the pages that use the template.

This doesn't seem very useful. I don't want "Lorem ipsum..." on all the pages on my site.

What am I missing?

You need to change the content in that region on the template. See the "Modifying a SiteAssist Professional Layout" tutorial in the Solution Recipe section of the SiteAssist Professional Support page:
siteassist/

Thank you. The tutorial is quite useful regarding how to make CSS changes that affect the site. (Though it doesn't show anything about changing the content of the left-hand column.)

If I understand your message correctly, it means that I have to have the SAME content in the left-hand column, in all of my pages (except the home page) -- because, as you said, if I want to make changes in that content, I have to do it in the TEMPLATE rather than in the individual pages.

Which means, if I'm not mistaken, that if I want to be able to change the left-hand column material on each individual page, I have to DETACH the individual pages from the template.

I guess I can live with this OK, but it surprises me that I have to do it this way...

If you want to have unique content in the left column for each page, you need to add an editable region in the left column of the template.

Ti insert an editable region, open the template, place your cursor where the editable region should be added, then go to Insert -> Template Objects - Editable Region.

I tried inserting an Editable Region into the beginning of the left-hand column, but that throws off the formatting of the whole page -- the left-hand column disappears, and the whole page is one single column.

I tried several other variations of where to place the editable region, but they all messed up the resulting pages in one way or another, or else kept the left-hand column still uneditable in the resulting pages.

Could be that I just don't know enough about how to hand-code CSS, to use SiteAssist properly.

The last-resort approach of detaching all the site's inner pages from the template will probably work for us, assuming that the CSS stylesheet remains in control of the actual look of the pages.

If it is throwing off the layout, the editable region is not being added inside of the left column div.


Make sure your cursor is within the left column div before adding the editable region.