Create A 'Welcome' Message

Ideally, the first item to put on to the Home page is a welcome message, which doesn’t need to be very long to tell the public a bit about your organisation. Create the message in a text file that will serve as your backup in case things go wrong.

Start by selecting Site Builder from the Administration>Site Management menu.

Select the Text (general purpose) widget and a Text Widget Settings window will pop-up.

Select the Text Widget Settings tab and copy the welcome message from a plain text file that you have saved on your computer and paste it into the text box. 

Do not copy the text from a Word document because the formatting codes will also be copied in and may interfere with editing that you do within the widget.

In the example below, the font has been changed by highlighting all of the text and selecting the font from the 'Font' dropdown list.

The next screenshots illustrate the creation of an email link to a person's name.

Highlight the text to be linked and click on the link icon.

Click the 'mailto:' button to place this text at the beginning of the link address then enter the email address for the person concerned. Click the 'OK' button to save the link.

The linked text will change to blue as in the example below.

Now return to the General Widget Settings tab to set the size and position of the widget on your page.

The dimensions of X-Axis =294 and Y-Axis = 390 will place the widget below the header image and roughly centred. 

To add a border, tick the Border box, and change its colour by clicking the square next to the Border colour field. Click on the desired colour in the vertical spectrum, then find the right shade within the large square.  

Click Save Widget to see the message on the Home page.

The welcome message is incomplete - the last line of text can't be read without scrolling down. In this case, the box may be enlarged by clicking on the bottom right corner (where the lines make a triangle) until the cursor changes to an arrow pointing south-eastwards. By holding down the mouse button, the corner can be dragged outwards.

To make other changes, in Site Builder, hover the cursor over the widget until you see a four-arrow cursor appear, then click on the widget. This action opens the widget for editing.

The screenshot below shows the complete text message inside the border.

To see how it looks on the public side, select Exit Builder to leave the Site Builder and then Exit Administration to get back to the Home page.

My Home page now looks like this:

Now that you have created a welcome message, repeat the exercise to place another Text widget on the page for announcements, junior nets etc.