Pimp My Wizzle Formatting Concepts I've Figured Out With The Extraordinary Tools At Our Disposal

Hubpages was my first sandbox and I learned a great deal, especially because there were some limitations I couldn't understand (why they were implemented) like not being allowed to put an image to the left!

Wizzley, on the other hand, offers me a new playground to sculpt some amazing articles that are chiseled in artistic aesthetics- a personality if you will, that is, in my opinion, just as important as the quality content your dressing up. The content appeals to the readers analytical left brain, but you can't neglect the right brains playful nature. It's a bit like putting the kids in the Gym daycare, you go to work on the gym equipment and tone up your vessel through life, meanwhile your creative, exuberant, curious, and a bit entitled to some nice wall paper to get excited about, side is in being taken care of and playing with the visual toys.

This is not to say the right brain is a child, just that it exudes child like exuberance in it's nature. It's creative and loves seeing new things, enjoying great colleges of art, and is the side that makes people really immerse themselves into the dance of words and pictures, formatting, and excitement you felt when you wrote the piece!

Just imagine how you felt when you saw "The Matrix" (assuming you did like it). The movie was a psychological thriller and the concepts alone were mind blowing, but add that layer of effects and the philosophies come alive.

The actors push you into the world deeper (i.e. formatting in wizzles to readers). I've collected a few ideas and will share them with you below. I will update this as new things come to mind. I will also use this page to copy paste the effects (lines, boxes in text, etc... you'll see).

It stimulates the reader's intellect, answers inquiries they had, and entertains their mind with beautiful aesthetics that make them feel important and at ease, even excited. It also should have a built in braking system. The mind races and needs help breaking to absorb the information and process it.

Too many words in a row and the brain sees work. Paragraphs that go on for miles with no aesthetics or imagery to immerse them into the plot and they see homework, not enjoyable reading and an immersive experience they are after. Even someone wanting to quickly research something wants to quickly identify with the information and formatting as well as context (quality writing) helps them do that. Remember we're writing but also servicing our readers!

Your account is like a cable station channel (author acct) on a larger network (wizzley). You create the programming but aren't the only channel on the web! Your programming brings them in through word of mouth and other venues, your monetization is the television commercials.

Competition is not just about SEO it's about getting people to interact and react to your article. Web 3.0 is all about this. 2.0 took us from 1 dimensional sites to interactive ones, 3.0 is going to take that to the relationship level- where customers (readers are potential klickers (misspelled on purpose) will make purchasing decisions based on real informative value and relationships with sites that bring them well built pages.

If I research on a Wizzley page and my experience is potent- I got what I needed succinctly and in one page, I'm definitely going to bookmark that page so I can find more on this site when I run into a research need. 

Formatting can also draw out the context of the article more and further immerse them into the information. The synergy of a great article is designed to fully immerse the reader in an experience not just boring research. There is a balance but also keep in mind that some minds enter your page after a lot of disappointing pages or simply a lot of reading across several pages.

Think of it like this. Would you rather write a book and sell it as a bound book or a folder with printed out pages of the book and no pictures? See where I'm going with this?

A good article allows their mind to easily discern your content by good use of space around things, lines to break up blocks of text, no more than 6 lines per paragraph, using formatting techniques, and so on. There are a lot of bad (aesthetically) pages out there with good information crammed together in black and white. People like dynamic and vivid colors, well laid out formatting that makes your article 3D in appearance.

We're in the Pintrest age of a sort. Sites are starting to convert to a more aesthetic appearance and this is a great opening for your wizzles to shine! Your article should also tell the story both in images and formatting that the words tell. The aesthetics are an external shell of your article, a container if you will, and it can draw someone in deeper who wants a richer experience in reading articles. Magazine like pages are vibrant and built with the reader in mind.

With that I try to make my Wizzles shine, look professionally polished and attractive. Formatting I use is designed to excite them and draw their entire consciousness into the article. Some people may not even read the article and may simply scroll slowly through your page just to see your formatting! That's time on a page, and they may be potential earners for you if your Amazon module image provokes their sense of urgency to purchase something!

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Part II: Tricks In Formatting For Aesthetics And More

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The rest of this article is going to walk you through some techniques I use, then it will assume you understand the concepts after seeing the breakdown (image explaining how it was created) and will start showing you samples from many of my pages where I created some interesting text effects and line break effects to hopefully give you some ideas for creative formatting of your wizzles.

These techniques use all keystrokes/text/underlines etc... to generate their "compartmentalizing" effects so this won't slow the page load much, the images if you decide to use them too may but you already add images right?

Enjoy, I spent 8 hours building just this section for you. 

Comments appreciated!

One of the most used things (in my articles), is  line breaks. These are made up of two types of lines I add into my text modules.

The first is just a basic underline _ _ _ but together to form what looks like a solid line __________

To break up text you can line break inside the text capsule with one of these or use the text capsule itself to form a separate line (like adding an image but with text).

All you have to do is hold down shift and the dash key (to use the second line the underline).

In the module you want to terminate this line in different places depending on the font you choose for the titles. It's just more or less underlines.

For the default one the line terminates just before (looking at the top of the module where you see html the redo undo bold italic etc... buttons on the right side directly before hitting the word count first number.  (see image).

It creates this:

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To enhance the line a bit bold print it.

To make it the color of the pages titles (module title color), just highlight the entire line and change the box in the middle of the module tool belt defaulting at "Paragraph" to "module Title" - See images below:

(this is the line you will see in the post, you will have to trim it because the module title makes it bigger in the post as well as changing the color to the module titles color):

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There are two modes to this. Module Title and Module Subtitle. The module subtitle is going to essentially be slightly more robust than bold printing it but it also gives it a faded appearance that looks great under a colored heading/title.

You can play with it to get it the way you want for your particular needs.

keep in mind what you see in the module text box isn't always perfectly accurate with what appears in the page (considering you're in full width mode). The line break example shows that. It overlaps in the module but not on the page.

You can get different effects in bold print mode for each line type (module title or subtitle). If you use bold while the Module Title is set for the line, it will cancel out the color and display an h3 sized line that's bold printed. So if you want the cool color effect you have to assure the bold is off.

You can also use this in any module that allows you to put in a title. In an image module you can just copy paste (or manually redraw) the line AS the title but make sure if you use a TOC in your article you're checking the boxes next to any modules with lines or your TOC will be a mess!

The classic underline is great for breaking up large blocks of text and enhancing images by it (by contrast) But A Box Line Is Cool Too! I discovered this on someones profile on Hubpages. It was simply an Ascii character you could insert (and the modules accept) to create a basic cursor looking block. I don't know what creates this I just copy pasted it and like the underline just put it side by side over and over again until I had the right line size. here is the character:

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It can also be module titled/colored in your post bringing a neat effect to break up sub-chapters of your longer articles.

In most of the fonts this line is a seamless line break. You can't see several boxes with lines, but in a few this is what happens. I got creative with those but that's another effect I'll explain in a moment.

Here is what it looks like in the perfect size to max out the width of the page:

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If you want to center it don't put it in the title field of a text module, put it in the text box (main content box in the module) and use the center formatting in the tool bar to center it like any other text.

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Here are some renditions of keyboard combinations I came up with for various articles I've written...

1. 

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(in this you see the boxes but it's kinda neat anyway!)

2. 

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3. 

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This Is Another Neat Way To Create A 100% Text Title

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The above effect is just clever text macrolling :)

Here is how it's broken down:

Effects can be created by simply experimenting with visual concepts like I did above. At the end of this article I'll list all my articles with effects in them (one per effect) so you can see how I did a lot of mine. I try to create a new feel every time and you can do that even using the same effects, with different images. I experiment with moving modules around, adding lines, and more.

Side By Side Comparison

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Article Examples Of Effects In Use On This Page

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All The Articles The Images Above Were Taken From Are Below: