Create A 'Welcome' Message

Creating 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.

Start by selecting Site Builder from the Administration Home page.

Select the HTML (general purpose) widget and an Add Widget – General settings window will pop-up

The message would normally be one column wide and appear in the centre of the page – see the radio buttons have been clicked in the screen shot below.

Copy the welcome message from a plain text file that you have saved on your computer and paste it into the text box. The text file also serves as a backup in case anything goes wrong.

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.

To add a border, tick the Border box, and change its colour by clicking the square next to the Border colour field.

I have spaced out my text using the return key.

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

The welcome message looks fine but I have decided that it might look better wit a larger font size. To make any 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 screen shot below shows that I have selected all of the text (using Ctrl+A for Windows or Cmd+A for Mac) and then selected Font. The default font size is 3 and I am increasing it to 4.

When I save the widget, the next illustration demonstrates the effect on the Home page.

The text now flows beneath the border and needs to be tidied up by making the border expand. To do this, place the cursor on the three parallel lines in the bottom right hand corner of the frame and you will see its shape change.  Click and drag the box outwards until the text fits inside.

To move the widget to a different position, left click on the four-arrow cursor and move it around until you are happy with its placement.

The changed widget looks like this:

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 HTML widget on the page for announcements, junior nets etc.