Your Welcome page is the first thing people see when they arrive at your SocialGO site, so it's important to make sure it looks its best!
There are two ways in which you can customise the first page visitors see when they type in your site's URL.
- You can customise the Welcome page which is set up by default with the activity stream on the right, and with your site title, description, default icons and a 'Latest Members' widget on the left. To find out how to customise this template page, check out this tutorial.
- Alternatively, you can create a new page in your admin center, set this as your Homepage and disable (or delete) the default Welcome page. This new page can be a completely blank page, a blog, a gallery or whatever you want it to be. This tutorial covers this method, showing you how to set a new page as your homepage and making it look awesome.
Option 2: Creating a custom Welcome page (homepage)
There are many ways in which you could design your custom page, we're going to show you one version with 4 easy steps.
- Create a new blank page and set it as your homepage
- Disable (= hide) the default Welcome page
- Customise the main area with introductory content about your community, club, business...
- Customise the right-hand column with other information, quotes, photos etc.
1. To create a new blank page and set it as your homepage:
Go to Build in your admin center and add a new blank page by clicking on the 'Add a page' button in the upper left corner. Select 'Blank Page', and name it - we named our page 'Home'. When the page is set up, click on 'Page settings' in the upper right corner of the build window. This will take you to the settings page for this new blank page.
On the settings page, scroll all the way down to the bottom. You will see 4 buttons (Save, Delete page, Set as homepage, Cancel). Click 'Set as homepage' and confirm. This will change the default page visitors see when they type in your site's URL the new page instead of the default Welcome page.
2. To disable (= hide) the default Welcome page:
When you have switched the Homepage to be your new blank page, you can disable the template Welcome page by clicking on 'Disable page' in the upper right corner (next to 'Page settings'). This will hide the Welcome page from your visitors.
PS: You could also delete the Welcome page by going into 'Page Settings' and selecting 'Delete page', but this means you would lose this page forever, so you wouldn't be able to switch back if you wanted the default page again. This is why we recommend you disable it instead.
3. To customise the main area with introductory content we've added some informational text and a nice image
We used the 'Text' widget, which brings up a text entry window. Here, we added a headline, a sub-heading and a blurb about the bike shop with links to other areas of the site. You can type anything you want to tell your visitors here. You can also add hyperlinks, change the font size and style and do all other things a text editor normally allows for. Make sure to keep it short and informative, so you don't scare your visitors away with too much text!
For the image, we used the 'Single Photo' widget and uploaded an image we created in Paint. To make it more interesting, we added a short line of fancy text to this image, explaining what the bike shop specialises in. The width of this image shouldn't be more than 700 pixels.
4. To customise the right-hand column we added a cycling quote, a Signup Box, an image and the Latest Photos widget
You can obviously place anything you like here, so have a play and see what works for you! If you're a business, you may want to put special offers, contact information or a contact form in here. For a sports club, you could put in a weather widget using our Custom HTML widget, or the latest community photos via a Slideshow.
Of course, you could also put the Latest Site Activity widget here, like it is on the original Welcome page, although in that case, it's easier to customise the default Welcome page.
Either way, have fun customising and email email@example.com if you have any questions!
If you're happy with the default Welcome page but just want to spruce it up a bit, have a look at option 1: customise your Welcome/Home page.
If you've got more suggestions, or would like to show off how you've customized your welcome page, just leave us a comment below - we'd love to hear from you!