• Log in / create account

• Home
• Categories
• Manuals
• Directories
• News Wire
• Blog
• Help
• Contributor Tools

Why merely read SmallBusiness when you could contribute some of your own knowledge and experience? Here, anyone can write or edit entries - it's quick and easy! This General Help page will give you some tips on how to get started. Make sure you create an account and log in before continuing.

Contents 1 Only registered users of SmallBusiness may add or change content 2 Basic Editing 3 Creating a New Entry 4 Basic formatting tags 5 General guidelines for new users (and old) 6 Building a Local page 6.1 Local examples

Only registered users of SmallBusiness may add or change content

To register, click on "Create an Account" at the top of any page. While we encourage you to use your User page to promote yourself and your business, please do not use other areas of Smallbusiness.com for promotional purposes. You can customize your User page by clicking on your username after you have registered. Here's a sample user page.

Basic Editing

Editing a previously existing entry is the most essential and most common way for a user to interact on SmallBusiness. First, you must either click on the Edit tab at the top of the page (you must be logged in to see the tab -- it is next to the Discussion and History tabs) to edit the entire entry, or click on the Edit links to the upper-right of each sub-heading to edit an individual section of the entry. What you will see is the text of the entry, plus a lot of gobble-dee-gook. The technical term for that gobble-dee-gook is tags and they are a part of a very simple code that explains to our website how you want the text to look. In a section below, you will find a few tags that are the most useful. Fun trick: You can click on the edit link right above this entry and see how this page was made using these tags.

Creating a New Entry

This should be easier, we'll admit. And one day it will be, we promise. But now, you've got to follow these instructions to create a new entry. First, start with the URL (the web address) displayed in your browser on any SmallBusiness page. For example, on this page, it should look like:

http://smallbusiness.com/wiki/Help:General_help

In the web-address window of your browser (if you don't know what that is, perhaps you should come back in a few weeks when we have this simplified more), change the portion of the URL Help:General_help to a string of words that are the name of the new entry you would like to create. For example, if you wanted to start a new entry about the Roman Empire (we picked a topic that you're not likely to actually find on Smallbusiness.com), then the URL you would want to type into your web-address window would look like this:

http://smallbusiness.com/wiki/Roman_empire

Once you change the URL, hit return and you will go to page on Smallbusiness.com where you can start your contribution. Please take some time to name your new page. And notice that the first word in the string of words should be capitalized and the following words are lower-case. URLs on SmallBusiness are case sensitive, so try to follow this guideline. Of course, if your entry is a person's name or a proper name, you should capitalize both words.

If you want to experiment, use the sandbox

Basic formatting tags

• Boldface

'''Bold text'''

• A link to another page on Smallbusiness.com (internal link). Note that you don't have to use the underscore symbol ( _ )

[[Roman empire]]

• An internal link, but you want the displayed words (what the reader sees) to be different from the exact name of the page. Notice the horizontal slash symbol "|" between the link location and the words you'd like to display.

[[Roman_empire|the words you want displayed go here]]

• An external link to a URL not on Smallbusiness.com

[http://smallbusiness.com]

• An external link to a URL, but you want the displayed words to be different from the URL. Notice there is NO horizontal stroke symbol "|" used between the URL and the displayed words in an external link tag (unlike the internal link tag described above where the "|" symbol IS used). Makes no sense to us, either. But that's how it's done.

[http://smallbusiness.com the website Smallbusiness.com]

• Line break (This should look familiar to those who know any HTML.)

<br>

• Category heading

== Category Heading ==

• Sub-category heading

=== Sub-category heading ===

• Bullet point

*Bullet point

• Secondary bullet point

**Secondary bullet point

• Indent a section of type ("blockquote")

:

General guidelines for new users (and old)

• Search to see whether someone has written a similar page before you start one yourself. Choose the title carefully.
• Review conventions of the project you are working in regarding e.g.:
  • naming conventions; see also Help:Page name.
  • whether a separate page is justified; perhaps it is better to add the text to a related page (especially if the text is not very long); that page can always be split later, after it has grown.
• While creating the page and before saving it, check the What links here link on the creation page. Align the new content with existing links, or change the new title, or fix the other links.
• If nothing points here, the page is isolated. Links to it will need to be added on other pages.

Building a Local page

To create a Local page from scratch, follow the steps for creating a page on SmallBusiness.com. Please use the naming conventions already set up for existing SmallBusiness.com Local pages--check the examples below if you need help.

What should you add to your Local page? Ideas include:

• History of your area
• Snapshot of the economy
• Links to resources helpful to small business, like chambers of commerce; local, state, and federal government offices; networking groups; and more
• RSS feed of small business news in your area
• Anything else you find useful in your own business

Local examples

These pages are further along in the development process. They may serve as a good example as you begin creating a SmallBusiness.com Local page for your city or town.

Know another great SmallBusiness.com Local page that we should all strive to emulate? Add it here by clicking the edit link to the right of the Local examples headline.

• Local: Nashville, TN
• Local: Memphis, TN