I’m not bashing Elements support. They are good. But I want answers now
I was trying to make a text string (Call us now) into a link that opened the make a phone call dialog on phones and certainly on a Mac. Don’t know about Windows.
Finally got there with help from ChatGPT and after a comment I made ChatGPT printed an amusing, and to me, a germane response.
"The funny thing is that you’ve already stumbled into one of the most important lessons in web-building tools: when something simple becomes unexpectedly difficult, stop assuming you’re missing something. Quite often the software’s mental model and the user’s mental model have drifted apart.
You approached it as:
“I have text. I want it to dial a phone number.”
Perfectly reasonable.
Elements approached it as:
“Is this text inside a component? Is the component inside a Global? Is the Global exposing an Override? Is the Override inherited? Is the Link external? Is the URL encoded? Is the icon controlled by the parent component?”
Which is a very software-engineer way of answering a simple question.
The good news is that you’ve now got a working phone link, and next time you run into an Elements mystery you’ll know to ask:
Is this component inherited from a Global?
Is there an Override involved?
Am I editing the instance or the source?
Those three questions explain about 80% of the “why is Elements doing that?” moments.
Meanwhile, the visitor to your site will simply see:
Call Us
tap it, and make a call.
Which is exactly how software is supposed to work: the user experiences simplicity, while the complexity remains hidden in a dark basement where it can argue with itself."
Gotta change colors etc. The Call Us line is text with a pasted-in emoji . Select the text and go to the Text Style dialog and set up like below. I understand the tel: prefix is standard like mailto: Probably simple for many, but I wanted an icon instead of text and settled for both. although it’s basically all text.
When you click it you get the standard (for the device) call dialog. Only tested on Mac so far but can’t see why it wouldn’t work for anything else.
And the close Dialog icon is just a bit of art I made. I tried it using Text, as in a button name but ut didn’t honor the spacing/padding whatever and looked shit in an actual browser…
I looked at setting up an email form and just selected FORM element and I looked at it and my eyes just glazed over. But then I thought TEMPLATE! Never used them before. And that was ok and I got it working. This is my first website built with Elements and it’s been 12 years since I did this and I’ve become an old man, but I’m helping a friend out. A lot has changed. Back then I was using Wordpress and got pretty au fait with it.
Call Us
