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Tips for Refreshing Your Edlio Site-- Without a Redesign [Edlio Webinar]

Added Jan 08, 2022 •

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Want to refresh the look of your responsive Edlio site*, but don’t have the time or resources for a full redesign? We’ll show you how you can give your site a new look and feel utilizing both the tools in your CMS, and our amazing Support Team. *Please note this is meant for responsive sites only. If your Edlio site is currently not mobile responsive, please reach out to your Client Success Specialist to learn about potentially free redesign options.

Show Transcript

Thank you all so much for joining us today for this My Edlio webinar. Today we're going to be looking at some ways that you can refresh your Edlio website without having to do a full-on redesign. Now this webinar is meant for current Edlio clients and our customers know we put a great deal of care into the design, look, feel of our websites. The end product speaks for itself also as our clients know our sites are completely hard-coded which means that if you're looking to make any big changes or if you're looking to fully overhaul your site you'll need to go through the redesign process where we bring in our project managers, designers coders to deliver your dream site. A Gallery Redesign can take about six to eight weeks depending on the time of the year and we fully understand that not everyone might have that amount of time to dedicate to redesigning their website. That's where this webinar is meant to come into play we want to show you some tips and tricks to kind of refresh your site, revitalize it a little bit without having to go through a full-on redesign. One more note before we get started this is meant for responsive sites only. If you're Edlio site is currently not mobile responsive please reach out to your Slient Success Specialist to learn about potentially free redesign options. Alright, so let's get started. Let's look at some ways we can refresh your Edlio site without a redesign. Alright, for this first section we're going to focus on your homepage and I really want to emphasize utilizing what you already have. What do I mean by that? Taking stock of what's on your homepage over there you have a photo shuffle, video spotlight messages things like that is what we're going to look at today and see what changes we can make there to kind of breathe new life into our Edlio website. So right now I am here on Rilo Academy. One of the things I see with photo shuffles quite a bit is schools not really using the high-res photos in the shuffles. These shuffles can look amazing but they can only look amazing if you're using you know great photos high resolution photos. Most phones nowadays you know if you're using iPhone or Android can take some really really beautiful professional-looking photos. So if you're just using you know someone's phone to take photos of the school things like that I definitely recommend doing that. If you have a photo shuffle really utilizing that space here you know so I'm going to show you right now one thing we can do so I'm on the Rilo Academy site here you see we have a pixelated photo here of what looks like their auditorium I want to show you a way we can go ahead and and reutilize this space here in a different way so let's hop over to their admin site. Alright and from here I can go ahead and update the shuffle by going to Media >> Shuffles. Alright and find the shuffle that is associated with your homepage here now here we can go ahead and we can change the layout here which photo is going in what order I want to get rid of this low-res photo here. It just looks bad it's a bad look for our school so in order to upload  new photos we go up here to Upload Media and upload from my computer Alright, so we see it's been added here, I'm going to go ahead and delete this old one that we have here. I don't want people seeing that I want to come over here and this is a banner I made in Canva you know if you have any sort of photo of any sort of design team at your school communications team that can help with this kind of stuff, that goes a long way. If not, let's just say you're a school admin, not a whole lot of photo editing experience- I always recommend using Canva if you can to go ahead and make beautiful looking content images things like this are they have a lot of great templates, preset tools there that make it super super easy. Y'know, even people with you know zero editing design experience can make some really great content using Canva. For this, Rilo Academy, we're a private school, I want to increase enrollment. I can use that photo shuffle to do that so you can see here, it's a more modern-looking design and I think it's going to zhuzh up the homepage quite a bit here so I want to save that. One of the other things I can do with the shuffle that weren't really utilizing before is linking it to a page, drawing people into the site itself. Alright, now I've already built out a form to link to this Photo Shuffle image here. So just go over here to link, enter link address. Go ahead and save that. Alright we'll come back over here to the Rilo Academy homepage and we'll refresh it. Alright and there we have it. There is our new image. You can see already from like what we had before. You know it really kind of brings a lot of life to the homepage already with just this small step. So if there's one thing I can really suggest, it's using Canva or any other sort of like photo editing service. Get yourself some professional looking photos here. You know it's a whole new element to to your site here so if you have a Photo Shuffle definitely recommend doing that and again also you know using that that link feature within it. So right now I'm clicking that. It's bringing me to that school registration form you that I built out, so that's that's pretty cool but not only do we have you know I don't already better-looking website but were using it to increase enrollment and engagement with our school community. Alright. Now I'm here on the Edlio College Prep School site. You'll see we have a video here instead of a Photo Shuffle. Now much like before you know if you have one of these we recommend using a hi-res video 1080P or above if possible. You know to kind of zhuzh up the site a little bit maybe like every semester or so maybe have a new video there you'll make a new video highlighting certain teams, certain accomplishments that happened within the last semester at your school. If your school has some sort of dedicated AV team, department or even just a club I am sure you can find your students that would love to help and making a video like this. You know media literacy is huge these days in school so I am sure you can find someone to help you you know make a great video for your school site. In a recent study scientists have found that the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. So you have this big visual medium here in front of you on your school site might as well use that to your advantage you know? Whatever you can to bring in your school community into your site you know really highlight that but again, If you can, try to put the the highest quality video if you can there, updating it every semester I think would be a great idea to bring new life to your site. Now if I were going to be updating this video I would do so over here in the admin site. I'd go down to Media >> Videos and Audio. Okay, now one more thing I wanted to look at-- let's go over here to the Edlio College Prep site. We'll scroll down here to our Spotlight Message. Y'know a lot of our sites come with Spotlight Messages, not every single one of them do, but a lot of them do. Now what are Spotlight Messages? They can be added to your website to showcase content that requires special attention. Think like the Principal's Message on your homepage. Now if you don't have a Spotlight Message and you want one, reach out to your Client Success Specialist and they can give you more information on how to do that. So, right now here I was like we had one from this past 2021 holiday season here we had a Christmas decoration party so let's go ahead and update that now. We have is kind of boring image- let's go ahead and update that again, kind of going back to what I was saying with the Photo Shuffles, You really want something that catches the eye there, right? We want to be visually appealing design. I would say using this image- it's not so great. You want to draw your school communities eye into your site here. Again, like I was saying before, your brain processes images 60,000 times faster then text, so you really want to make sure you have a striking a visual there to bring your audience in. Let's go ahead and look at how we can update the Spotlight Message. I want to go back over to the admin site, I'm going to go to the hamburger drop-down menu, Announce Spotlight Messages. Alright and we have this one right here 21 Christmas decoration party. Let's update that. Okay. we'll make this one about the high school basketball team all right and now let's update the photo here. Now again, what I'm really trying to convey here is that we want a really striking image there. Again, using a photo editing tool like Canva I think would be a great option here, especially if again you do not have any sort of design expert I think it'd be really solid for that. I want to add the alt text all right I'll come down here and select save. Okay let's come back over here to the Edlio College Prep School site. There we have the Spotlight messages as we were using it before. Let's go ahead and refresh, and there we go. just by updating that image there it kind of breathes new life into the section right here. Again, you know, utilize those visuals. Alright now changing gears slightly here, I am moving away from the home page and now I am coming in here to some inside pages. Specifically I am on my teacher page. My personal page here looks all right you know right now some some photos on here again went in and added some stuff I made in canva here, added some videos, you know to really kind of spruce it up a little bit add some life to it, but there's still more I can be doing. If you've ever seen any of my webinars, I always sing the praises of our hero images here at Edlio. I know this one does not have a Hero image yet,  we're going to go ahead and do that right now together. Again it's just one more thing I think that breathes new life into a page, having a hero image. Now what is a hero image? Let me hop over here to the admin site. Alright I'm going to go into my pages. I'm going to go here to Page Management Pages Alright I'm an admin, so I have access to all of the school pages here but I want to edit this page in particular, which is my teacher page, my personal page. I'm going to come over here to personal pages. Alright when I click on this page here. Now I am here now, the first thing I want to do is go here to layout. Now you'll see right now I have this auto selected here, has my section menu here on the left and the rest of the content here on the page. Now if you come down here we have this little horizontal bar at the top that is going to be a hero image layout. So let me go ahead and select that. That will give us an opportunity to add some stuff up here. Now we can add a section menu, so that'll go horizontally along here, some buttons. We have our new links feature which is pretty awesome. But we're going to go ahead and add a photo our hero image here. So I'll go ahead and click add, upload that here. Alright I'll make sure we add our alt text Alright now we will publish. Now if I come back over here to my page, I'm going to refresh that. Alright look at that. Now the Hero image that we have, that full width image goes across the entire width of the page. We come down here to the content and I'm getting that hero image. It's just another way to make it draw the eye, make it a little bit more visually appealing, a little more striking. you know, catch that audience. Again, so I've seen a lot of schools go in and add a Hero image to every single one of their pages. Depending on the school some have done in the section, every page within a certain section will have the same Hero image. I've seen some schools I utilize it is this way where they take every paid within a certain section and they will have the same Hero image on each page within that section. Kind of makes things a little more organized and also gives you a consistent look, a consistent brand there for each section. Alright and now I just kind of want to highlight and add some little things that you can add here and there, some of these might require a tech support, some of these might have a slight added cost to them. Now you know you we'll always encourage you to reach out to your Client Success Specialist whenever you're looking to make any kind of changes like these. But you know they're just some more things you can kind of do to help kind of freshen up your site if you're looking for a little bit of a change, but again do not want to do that full on redesign. One of the first things I'll offer is changing the font of your site. If you go over to Google font you can pick any of those fonts there and we will be able to update your site with your selected font. Now I'm going to take a look at some options here that would come at an additional cost, would still be a cheaper than going through a full-on redesign. But again, I think that these would got to add a little more life to your homepage if you do not have them. So first off, a social media hub if your school or district is super active on Facebook, Twitter Instagram, things like that, I definitely recommend getting one of these on your homepage. It draws more traffic to those social media pages so your parents can go ahead and follow you on all of those platforms there. Brings more eyes to the messages you are trying to get out to your audience. I think it's a great use of space on your homepage. come down here we have an at a glance section you can add one of these to your homepage as well. It's a great way to the kind of highlight you know the amazing work that your school district is doing. We generally see things like this like a student-teacher ratio, your attendance rate, sports teams, scholarships, things like that things that. We know people can just look at this real quick, and be like wow, this is a quality school or district here. It's a whole lot of information condensed into this little space here so people get a better picture of what your school or district is all about. Definitely recommend these at a glance sections Again, reach out to your Client Success Specialist for pricing on that. One last thing I I wanted to point out here is a college scroll. This can be added to your home page. It's a great way to kind of let visitors in your school community know where your amazing students have gone off to, where all of your hard work in the school district has led your students, where they have gone to after. It's a great way to market your school. You know, hey, look at all the amazing places our students have gone and you know it's just a great way to shine a spotlight on the hard work that they've done. They've gone through all this work at school and now they're going to these prestigious schools, and on top of that again just a visually engaging way just to show how awesome your school is on your homepage. Again reach out your Client Success Specialist for info on pricing for adding this to your homepage. Alright I think we're just about ready to wrap up for the day, but before we do I did want to highlight one more thing. If you're on the fence about whether or not to get a redesign, I'm 100% going to recommend that you do. A redesign will not only give you a beautiful new site but it will also provide your site with the most up-to-date coding which goes a long way in terms of accessibility. If you're interested in a redesign of your site please reach out your Client Success Specialist they're the ones who will guide you through the process and show you ways to get a redesign for free or at reduced cost. If you're not sure who your Client Success Specialist is, please reach out to clientsuccess@edlio.com and will be happy to point you in the right direction. Thank you as always for joining us for today's webinar. We hope to the next one. Take care!

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Tips for Refreshing Your Edlio Site-- Without a Redesign [Edlio Webinar]

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