Home Page!
Help Getting Started
Home Page
This is your Home Page. It is the first thing visitors will see when they visit your website. Never delete, rename or move your Home Page. You can navigate to your Home Page from anywhere in the site by clicking on the logo in the top left corner. Until you provide your own logo, you will see a Drupal logo.
About the Design Phase
Design tips are provided here on the Home Page to help you get started. Keep this content on the page until you feel comfortable with the platform, then feel free to delete it. Over time you will replace the pre-existing content with your own Home Page content. Investigate the settings of existing Bands and Components to understand how to replicate their appearance. Web Managers can Clone this page to save a copy of it with a new name, if desired. Get help on working with Bands and Landing Pages.
About the Pre-Launch Checklist
After your website is fully designed, you must complete several tasks before the website launches. A Pre-Launch Checklist is provided here on the Home Page to guide you through those activities, like testing webforms and setting up Google Analytics so that your website will appear in searches. Be sure to remove all design help and pre-launch checklist content from this Home Page before launch. The Home Page should only contain your content by launch.
Color Palette and Logo
Select a Color Palette
Let us know which Color Palette you prefer and we will apply it for you.
Provide a Logo
You can design your own logo or ask for our help in designing one.
Logo Specifications
- 250px wide by 75px high
- Vector-based image such as SVG or EPS that will ultimately be a PNG.
- The logo artwork must use the entire 250x75 area, even if parts of it are empty whitespace.
- You may provide a logo file bigger than 250x75, but it must maintain the same ratio proportions, e.g., 500x150.
Accessible from the Start
Digital Accessibility
You should design your website with Digital Accessibility in mind- it should not be an afterthought. You should:
- Follow Digital Accessibility best practices to ensure compliance.
- Provide Alternative Text for every image you upload to the Media Library unless it is purely decorative.
- Convert PDFs to web pages whenever possible.
- Ensure that PDFs or other uploaded documents are accessible.
Ongoing Monitoring
Our third-party tool scans your website weekly to track website quality and detect usability and accessibility errors so you can address them. If you need help with this tool, reach out to our team.
EditoriA11y
EditoriA11y is an automatic accessibility checker built into Digital Commons. EditoriA11y marks potential errors with a yellow (?) flag and confirmed errors with a red (!) flag. Address these issues as you design your website to avoid creating a backlog of errors that need remediation prior to launch.
Ideas and Inspiration
Provide a Summary for SEO
Provide a Summary for every new Content Type you create. The Summary shows in search engine results with a link to your page, helping visitors decide which link they want to click on, thus enhancing your Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Right now, the Home Page Summary reads:
"Replace this Summary with your own. Always provide a concise Summary for each new page you create. It appears in search results with the link to the page. A good Summary enhances SEO."
Webforms
When you need to collect information from your visitors, a webform is usually the best way to go. We can help you set one up, as long as it does not collect Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
Catalogues
We can help you configure a searchable, filterable catalogue for your website using criteria specific to your content. Once it is configured, Publishers can easily add new Catalogue Items to the Catalogue.
Default Views
Every Digital Commons website comes with default views for Blogs, Events, and Press Releases. These collate pages of the same Content Type together, making a hub to browse and filter them all. Use the views you like and disregard the rest.
Don't see precisely what you need? Let us help you create a Custom View.
Webforms
Webform Videos
Grant User Access to a Specific Webform
Attach a Webform Entity to a Webform Node
Configuring Email Notifications for your Webform
Set Up Google Analytics
Steps for Setting up Google Analytics
- Create a Google Analytics account if you don't already have one. You can set it up or we can help you. Let us know if you want help.
- Add nc.digitalcommons@gmail.com to view the account as Admin.
- Give us the code for GA4 so we can configure the website.
- We will create your Looker Studio Dashboard with this information.