Videos

Links + Homepage Widgets [Edlio Webinar]

Added Feb 23, 2025 •

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This webinar introduces you to Edlio's powerful Links and Homepage Widgets features, your tools for organizing important links and collecting visitor information. Here's what you'll learn: - Manage Links with Ease: Discover how to create, edit, and organize links into sections and topics, making it easy for visitors to find what they need. - Customize Your Homepage: Explore how to add eye-catching homepage widgets to collect visitor contact information or direct them to important pages. - Enhance User Experience: Learn how to strategically place links and widgets on your website for optimal navigation and engagement. - Boost Website Functionality: Understand the benefits of using links and widgets to improve your website's overall usability. Don't miss this opportunity to take your website to the next level!

Show Transcript

and welcome to this edlio webinar on links and homepage widgets my name is Taylor I am a trainer here at edlio and I'll be leading you through today's session where we can see how you can create creatively place links throughout your homepage and into your inside pages so without further Ado let's jump into the content today we're going to be going over our links and homepage widget feature that give you engaging ways to share links Beyond simply linking them in your site navigation menu or feeling like they get lost in your pages we're going to go through all of the different ways that you can use our links feature how you can manage your different link topics whether you have those links on your homepage or you use them on your inside Pages we're going to be able to learn how to create and manage those topics to make it easy for you as a web admin to situate the correct links on uh the areas that you want folks to have that information and ways that you can make it visually uh easy for folks to find what they need on your page we're going to look at Links of course on your homepage as well as eye-catching homepage widgets to uh share links with folks or collect visitor contact information direct them to important Pages highlight um timebound special programs or events that you're trying to drive attention to maybe things like uh School tours or enrollment all the different ways that you can use those homepage um and straight strategically place those for optimal engagement and navigation additionally um these links are going to help you boost your website functionality by being able to go ahead and pull the URLs of pages that you have created or any of your features let's say a URL of a form or of your video gallery um we're going to be able to use links and widgets to strategically um place on our website how to go ahead and Lead folks to those areas that we want them to see boosting our website functionality so in order to cover all of this um pretty simple today we're going to go through our links first looking at the homepage and then looking how we can create reusable menu on our inside pages and then we'll come back to the homepage and look at our widgets so um how we can create standout links using our homepage widgets and also create quote collect folks contact information to send newsletters and even email Communications through our broadcast email is now included with everyone's CMS so great news there if you haven't used your email before we're going to be able to collect folks contact information to start sending those free emails so with no further do let's jump into our dashboard and I'm going to locate my links feature here in my hamburger menu opening page management and coming to links so the very first thing I want to point out here on um our links feature is the topic drop-down menu here so you may have just a few topics you may have many like my demo site here when I select a topic if I see this used in sight design button to the right that means I'm going to see that set of links somewhere on my home page so let's jump over to our homepage we can always click our homepage button here to identify what type of links we have on this demo site we're using today um so our site has quite um quite a lot of Link topics that were put on when our site was designed giving us a lot of ways is to share information again Beyond situating everything here in our site navigation menu for example we have a whole set of Links at the top giving us an enroll button different social media links so we can click these buttons and be taken to our schools social media scrolling a little bit farther down I've got a sort of the main links this is often called the quick links topic here to highlight um some of our most important links and what's great about our link feature is that we can go ahead and add a additional links here or swap these out depending on what are the most important links that we want situated here on the homepage for where we are at in the school year is it our parent portal our staff directory maybe we want to link a page that we've created where we have um embedded our school handbook and gone ahead and outlined our school policies maybe we want to link our uh lunch menu or a nutrition program page enrollment and registration forms or pages with information about our registration um maybe we a page section about all of our extracurricular activities and sports that we want to go ahead and highlight maybe a page on academic resources or even our contact information we are going to be able to go ahead and swap out and add and delete so manage all of these links here let's go ahead and scroll a little bit farther down because you may also have some links in your footer as I have here um we're also going to find these of course as uh topics in our links feature um so here we can go ahead and uh make sure that we have really important or necessary uh documents linked such as our non-discrimination policy maybe a careers page we have here linked our uh school's social medias again some of those other important links that we want to go ahead and exist on our foot across all of our Pages um that's what's great about your links that are here on your footer is while your main quick links is really great and highlighted um this is of course only on your home page whereas your header and footer links are going to follow folks no matter where they go on your website so in order to swap out these links we are going to go ahead and simply add a link maybe I um want to go ahead and add my lunch menu to that main set of uh quick links and I can see here that I am in that homepage links topic um that corresponds to the links I see on the homepage so I'm going to go ahead and drop a title and the link where I want to take folks now in this case I don't have any um icon ones that are displaying I just have the text that is displaying here and other link topics the icons are going to be very key like in our social medias we don't have any text that is displaying all that is coded to display is that icon so again you can uh take note about your homepage design and play around with what looks best maybe you want to go ahead and add um icons so they can exist in each of these buttons um that's wonderful you can go ahead and simply come over to select an icon and search our icon library to go ahead and situate icons on all of your links especially when we look at putting links on our inside Pages icon give a great Extra Touch um that you might consider going ahead and uh going next to Mile and putting those icons on again when we get to Pages I'll show you um what those look like in this case um we're going to keep ours un form with what uh is currently on our homepage so no icons just text we've added the destination where folks uh we want to take visitors should they click on lunch menu so we're going to go ahead and Save in bottom right so again um some really great options are maybe we want to go ahead and put that lunch label maybe we want to put our parent portal I can just add a link drop the title drop the link where I want to take folks and Save maybe I want to go ahead and swap out these links as you see um as we continue to add more we can see that it's um in most cases of your homepage design is simply going to create another row for us so maybe we want to add a ninth to go ahead and make that a nice um symmetrical section again or maybe we want to go ahead and keep to 6 simply uh removing temporarily some of the forms or links that maybe are not relevant at this time of the year so let's say enrollment for example has closed and we want instead to highlight our parent portal we can always anytime we see this Domino go ahead and move around the order of our um of our items so the order in which the links appear and if we want to go ahead and simply pull that enrollment off of our homepage for the moment instead highlighting the other links we can come over to your to these 3 dots 3 dots always lets us edit and we can go ahead and unpublish unpublished is great because everywhere you see and publish around the CMS um pulls that item off your website but now it's not deleted so when enrollment opens again in a few months I can simply come here and republish making that enrollment link reactive on my homepage you also can come here of course to edit the link so you want to make sure that both the text and the URL are correct um if you haven't been in your links feature before maybe you want to do a quick audit make sure all of these links have URLs and they're taking folks to the right destination if we notice oh this form is no longer correct or maybe it's closed at the moment we can come in of course and edit that link or maybe just unpublish to get to our nice uh 6 links that we have here on our homepage now easily swapped out uh to go ahead and highlight the most important Links at this moment in the school year another link that you might like to go ahead and use um situating somewhere on your homepage or in 1 of your links topics is a great tool to be able to contact the school your contact form can be found in your settings so I'm going to go to my hamburger menu down to site management and here to settings and I'm going to look for the contact setting now um here you can go ahead and edit um what your school's name your school's uh address a display email and phone numbers and here is going to to be your contact form so you just want to make sure that that contract form is enabled and that you have some recipients we can put several different emails here um to go ahead and send any responses to this contact form to those um those email addresses here if we click on this URL we can see that our contact form gives folks that contact information so our address and phone number at the top and then um the ability to go ahead give us their name their email and their message for us we're it's going to ask them to go ahead and verify they're not a robot if you want to go ahead and give any introductory text to this contact form give folks examples of why they might contact you contact you for a tour so on and so forth um then you can add that introductory text here and you'll notice that um if you are using contact forms or staff blocks when folks go to contact they're going to have to do a 2-step Verification uh verifying via a Google Microsoft Facebook or Yahoo account and you can always turn that off here it's on by default going ahead and protecting your site um from fishing activity so that's another good example of a link that you might want to bring in to your links feature here now beyond your homepage all of those topics that we again have are used in site design um that indicate that these are on our homepage you might want to create a topic of links that then you can pull on to your other pages on your website for example if I come to my uh World languages page here on my demo site and scroll down I can see I have a group of links taking folks to each page um each apartment page that we have in our school this is using the links feature the links feature beyond your homepage allows us to create really easy and really eye-catching and engaging reusable menus we can either use um we have the choice of using our link topics that already exist that are already on our homepage and we've already done the work of uh making them as useful as possible or maybe we want to create a different set of links that don't pertain to our homepage but that way we want to put on those pages like our department menu on our academic pages you can see that is um being pulled from a topic that's called Department menu it's not on my homepage um so this is a link topic that I'm using only for those inside pages but it's going to allow me to go ahead and pull this set of links onto as many pages I want with just a few clicks we're going to see how that works in just a moment before we go to pages to see how we can add these topics um to our page how do we create them so maybe you have a topic that you want to create like departments or maybe a topic like frequently used links that we want to go ahead and put as our reusable menu on every page we're just going to situate it at the bottom or on the side column of every page we have on our website so that no matter where folks go they're always finding finding these really key links that um we we know parents and students are always looking for You're simply going to come to manage topics you're going to create a new topic you can give it a name it's really just an internal name for you so is this your department menu is this your frequently Asked uh questions your FAQs whatever you want to call this topic you can go ahead and give it a name ideally spelled correctly you're going to go ahead and save it and now back in links you're going to identify that topic and start adding links to it in the same way that we already saw when you're creating uh a link menu especially if you plan to use it on inside Pages as um we are going to look now adding these icons is going to look really sharp as that is what gets us these icons in our links on the page so you might want to consider going ahead and adding those icons to make your links even more eye-catching let's go over to our page management so pages and Page manage meant to go ahead and see how we can add these links as reasonable menus to our Pages I'm going to um find the page section that I want to edit um looking through my categories or simply searching for the page I want to go ahead and um link my resources to our French Club page so in order to get buttons that look similar to these using those linked topics we are going to go ahead and create or edit an existing page um as we just did by finding it and opening it up and then coming and adding the page block link links can be added anywhere across the page maybe we want to go ahead and add it to the side column here I'm going to go ahead and add page block select links and then simple as that identify the topic that want to pull and it pulls with 1 Click all of those links onto this page so again making a really easy reusable menu you can also create buttons on individual Pages buttons you're going to have to um go ahead and create each individual button whereas links allows you to create that link topic once in the links feature and then pull it across every page your links can look like this or maybe we want them to look a little bit more like button in that case we're going to click on our link page block click our settings wheel and go ahead and change the link button block settings so we can go ahead and choose between our primary colors how do we want those to look a little a little more eye-catching or do we want to go ahead and move it back by clicking on the page block clicking on the setting Wheels to that list up to you um both look really great you can play around with what you think looks best we can also go ahead and add our links in our hero image so we have um the French flag as our hero image in our hero image layout those are these 3 layouts that allow us this top section um most commonly to add a hero image where the name comes from that splashy side to side image but we can also use this to go ahead and pull our section menu up vertically or in our case add some links so let's say you know on this page these Department buttons look really great but we want them at the top of the page so they're a little bit more Mark um navigable for folks to go ahead and jump between departments we think that's going to be easier for students to be able to find those links so let's go ahead and select that link topic pulling it into our hero image section of our layout it's going to Again by default go ahead and list those links and then if we want to move them um uh change them into that button setting again settings Wheels buttons go ahead and choose your color and there we have our beautiful set of Links at the top here if you're concerned with symmetry you want your links to be similar size sizes do your best to have them have about the same number of characters and that will um go ahead and end achieve more symmetry between the sizes of your uh link buttons we'll go ahead and publish and here we can see coming to our French Club page how our lovely links look as a reusable menu on our page and how easy was that to give folks access to all of our really crucial links that we want across our academic pages you could go ahead and create additional link topics for things like your Athletics programs um going ahead and linking all of your sign up forms you can use our forms tools to create those forms or maybe you want to create pages about each of your programs again manage topics create that topic called Athletics or you can repurpose an existing topic again 3 dots always lets you edit call this that Athletics topic and then start dropping those links there and you can have those links exist across all of your Athletics pages now we want to go ahead and look at our homepage widgets those are under page management and homepage widgets these are really great way to um create eye-catching links on your homepage um there especially um useful and effective to go ahead and create eye-catching links placed strategically for um timely events or different signups that you want to go ahead and draw folks attention to maybe programs things like maybe signing up for a school tour we are afraid that if we situate that link on our homepage it might get a little lost coming down here but if someone comes to our homepage to go ahead and check out um what our school is about and they have a widget that's floating to ask them to sign up for uh our tour how can we do that well we are going to come to homepage widgets so here you can see I have a lot of widgets on my page um that I have minimized for um my scrolling and if I go ahead and open those back up I'm going to see all of my widgets some of them move with the page but other than stay in place um like open house information than we want everyone to know about um when they come on our homepage so how do we create those well let's first wipe our existing widgets away we're going to go ahead and save changes that we've deleted those widgets and once we save changes we're going to see if widgets saved successfully up here if we're taking folks to a particular link I'm going to use my button widget Maybe I want this link to be towards the top of the page like where my open house button is to be um really obvious for folks coming to my uh School website maybe they're interested in sending their their student I want to go ahead and give them off the bat the chance to sign up for a tour so I'm going to go ahead and change my label for what I want that button to say and then I'm going to drop the URL for where I want that button to take folks so I've made a form using my forms feature to sign up for a tour my form is set to go ahead and let my emissions team know when anyone fills out the form to have a tour but how do I situate this um so that it really grabs folks attention and it's easy to find when they come to my website after finding my my school on the web homepage widget here scrolling down is where we can go ahead and choose the behavior of that widget this is really important when maybe we want it to stick to the window be a little bit more conspicuous and then what label style do we want that to have our second type of homepage widget is a form widget a form widget um is going to allow you to collect contact information for folks so you'll see that the default text displayed in the form widget is join our newsletter maybe this is something like join our volunteer list join our PTA join our booster club join our committee um maybe you want to Simply stick with newsletters so that you can start sending newsletters using our mass communication tool or sending emails using broadcast you can even push your news items to folks inbox using broadcast you can send those emails for free but of course we need emails to go ahead and be able to reach folks before we want to use a form widget we're going to need to make sure that we have a contact list created um so let's go ahead and save our form widget and then we'll head over to contact lists so I can show you how we create a contact list first let's design our form widget what information do we want to collect from folks and what are we going to require that they put in in order to submit a response now here is where I'm going to uh indicate where I want responses to be Ed so I'm going to create a contact list and then go ahead and click that contact list here I want all of my uh folks that fill out my widget to go ahead and be uh uh automatically put in my newsletter demo contact list I'm going to have the same options um of how my widget looks and I'm going to go ahead and save changes at the bottom so when I refresh my page here I can see my 2 different form widgets so my sign up for a tour today that's at the top there does not move versus our join our newsletter that moves with the page if you want these to be placed differently a little bit more in the center a little bit higher a little bit lower you're just simply going to play around with how these are situated on your mock homepage of course this is much shorter than your actual homepage is so you'll have to guesstimate you can play around saving your changes at the bottom and remember if you want to delete your widgets um you're going to go ahead and click the trash can and then save that you've deleted those so these are a really great way to go ahead and um highlight again special events things that you want to draw folks attention to and a really great way to go ahead and collect contact information where are those contact information going to be populated again we're going to go down to mass communication and contact lists and here we're going to see all the contacts lists that we have as well web admin we can create data file or custom contact lists so data file contact list allows us to bring contacts over from our sis and then we can supplement um that contact list with our homepage so that um Auntie Uncle Grandma can sign up for our newsletter even though they're not in our student information system or we can create a custom contact list this is uh going to allow us to Simply upload everyone on a 1 time basis to this list we're simply going to give the list a name choose which type of list we're going to create I'll show you how to create a custom contact list today we can add single contacts basic information here or we can add our contacts in bulk by downloading the CSV template then grabbing all of our parents' names and emails from our sis system putting it in our CSV saving it to our computer and uploading it here that's going to automatically populate that contact list with all of those folks information and then we can again use our homepage widget to ask folks to supplement um their contact list if they want to hear from us so with that we have covered our contact um excuse me our links and homepage widgets I hope this was helpful to go ahead and give you some ideas about how you can go ahead and um you know reduce how the need for having all of your links here in your site navigation menu instead pulling some of those those key links to some of your links categories or otherwise situating them on your homepage with homepage widgets a little bit less uh conspicuous than something like a homepage alert you can learn more about all of these features and more at our help center help edlio.com you're also going to be able to find Our Help Center resources when you come over to our dashboard and click on help um you can go ahead and search for different features ask a question our AIT member spike is going to pull the best races for you immediately and if you have any further questions you can always send us a message opening a support te uh support ticket or reaching out to the client success team at client success at edlio.com so again that's helped edlio.com and client success at edlio.com to send us an email if you have any questions we thank you so much for watching this webinar there you have the client success email on the screen so you can go ahead and take that down um the uh it's in their name they're here to make sure your site is successful so don't hesitate to reach out

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Links + Homepage Widgets [Edlio Webinar]

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