Getting started with website modeling

When a composer creates a new website, they begin by selecting a website template that includes a set of starter pages complete with placeholder text and other features to help them build the perfect website. Your hub administrators, managers, and developers work collaboratively to create all the different template flavors required for your hub.

Step 1: Designing what you're delivering to your customers

  • Before you begin creating website templates, you need to decide what types of websites you're creating, their navigational structure, and the types of images, text, and other content your composers will be required to create. These decisions determine which templates and page types you'll need to create.

Step 2: Creating page types

  • Page types are a specialized form of content types and are used to define what pieces of content a composer will use when composing pages. Your hub manager, in collaboration with your site designer and developer, creates the different page types used by your business. Any page type you create can be used in any of your websites or website templates.

  • To create a new content type, go to Content model > Content types in your hub's navigation ribbon. Then, click Create content type.

  • Select the types of elements needed for this content type from the element palette. There should be a one-to-one relationship between the pieces of content defined in your website design, the elements defined in a content type, and the layouts used by your developer to build your website.

  • Add placeholder text for each element in the Placeholder information tab of their configuration settings. Your placeholder text is used as a prompt for your composers and disappears as soon as your composer starts typing. For example, you might add a placeholder of Give your post an exciting headline to the heading of a blog page.

Step 3: Updating or adding layouts

  • The design and layout of the content that is displayed on your website are determined by the layouts that are managed by your website developer outside of your hub. If you need a new layout for a page or landing page, contact your site developer.

  • Our Acoustic Content developer center contains tutorials and documentation that is tailored to customizing the Oslo sample and landing pages.

  • You then map your layouts to different page types. A single page type can be mapped to multiple layouts.

Step 4: Creating your website templates

  • There are two different methods available to administrators and managers when creating new templates: they can create a template based on an existing template, or create a template based on an existing site.

  • To create a template from an existing template, go to Websites > Browse templates. Then, find the template you want to copy, open the More options menu, and click Copy.

  • To create a template from an existing website, go to Websites, find the site you want to copy, open the More options menu, and click Copy. When you create a template from a site, only the site structure is copied, and any directly referenced content is replaced with placeholder content.

  • Then, update your new template. You can rename your pages, add new ones, or remove them. Each page you create pulls its placeholder text from the page type you select when creating the new page.