Design Tips
About Content
Before putting content on a website consider on how you will organize your content. Your website may be easier to navigate if you break down your content into different pages. Sometimes it may help to divide your content into columns.
If you have a very long home page, but no inside pages, consider making several pages with this information. The user then will be able to focus on separate ideas and will be able to better understand your message.
Long amount of content in one page
Content divided in pages, with images
About Images
One element that can greatly help the design of your site is the use of images. In the updated Gato template we now have a large space on the banner area of our websites, to use high resolutions images.
The University Marketing Office has created a beautiful bank of images to be used for this purpose, you can find information about banners and other photography in their Official photo site.
Banners
University Marketing has done a great job in taking some amazing photography and curate them for you so they are perfect size for banners, all you have to do is pick them from inside Gato.
Before you try to upload a personal photo go check out the universities photo source and see if you can find one that fits your site. In this photo bank you will find some blur images, those can be used in the banner area as well. Blur images help your users focus on the content on your site, while adding a design element that makes it visually pleasing.
If you can't find an image that fits your content try contacting University Marketing and ask for a photo request. Remember that your site is also part of the Texas State website and would look more cohesive with proper photography.
In case you have a personal photography, you would need a high resolution photo that is sized 2000 px width by 500 px height(minimum, you may enter a larger height px it will automatically adjust). and is properly made for the web. Photography for the web means is 72dpi, RGB and less than 500 kb
Note: while we encourage high resolution photography, your file should be around 500kb upload size, otherwise it will take very long to load and your page will be very heavy
What content types work best for section combinations?
Not all content blocks will work best in a multicolumn layout, and you'll want to plan your content with that in mind. For example, in a four-column design, you probably won't want to put four sliders side-by-side. But a two-column, 50/50 layout with a slider on the left and a paragraph of short text or a list of links on the right is likely to be great. Less is often better.
Just remember that multicolumn layouts are not designed to help you fit all of your content "above the fold". This way of thinking may have made sense on fixed-size newspapers, but we don't have those limitations on the web. In fact, current research indicates that your off-screen content may be viewed and clicked more often than your content at the top of the screen.
The main point is that web users scroll and scan for content. Build your pages with a purposeful, clear hierarchy, and with an amount of whitespace that matches the baked-in elements of the new template.
