Block Help: Laying out your blocks
Best Practices
- Do not use a lot of 1x1 blocks on the home page - it makes the page look busy
- Organize content that has staff associated with it in using the departments page option
- Organize content with no staff associated with it using the sections page option
- List content in your top navigation drop down menus and keep the home page clean - 1 ½ pages of scrolling ideally.
- Use custom buttons on homepages to link the most important or most visited content - contact us for help designing those.
Page Areas
The below image outlines the main areas of your homepage. This guideline can be used as a basis for all your home pages. Helpful video here.
Banner
The banner is a custom image with your logo. We suggest a 3 column or 4 column wide by ½ to 1 column high message block. SchoolBlocks graphic designers are at your disposal to add spice to this banner. Please just add any images and text to a message block, then let us know if you would like us to spice it up! We may have to find a similar image if yours is not high enough resolution.
Custom Buttons Ask SchoolBlocks graphic designers to create custom buttons to link to content that needs to be front and center.
Body Area
This is your body area and a great place for content that needs to be visible on the home page. Big blocks up to 3 columns wide and 2-4 rows tall are best, except when you desire to use buttons. This area is also where any feeds from your calendar or a news block can live.
Home Page vs. Everything Else
Ideally, the only difference between your home page and sub-pages should be the banner. In sub-pages, a banner is still a great idea, it just doesn’t need to be as large. Often it’s often a restatement of the page/team/group/department name and its mission or vision. It’s essentially a title & subject for the page. And by only going 3 columns across, it leaves the 4th column available for a 1 column wide by 3 column high listing of events or news. That’s often a great combination!
Block Choices
It’s important to select the block that best matches the content you’re creating. Be sure to avoid always using message and page blocks. When using the Page Block, you can not hit hard or soft returns in your text - this will cause a heading to be out of place and you will get an ADA error. When possible, create your content in a Google Doc or online Word Doc, then link to it via the files block. Use Grackle to check your Google Docs for ADA compliance.
Block Sizes
This one is easy! Bigger is better! Try to avoid the default 1x1 block size by stretching or elongating almost everything. The fewer blocks per page combined with bigger blocks makes for a much more enjoyable experience for end-users.
For more information on how to resize or move your blocks, click here