As the administrator of your organization, you can create a compelling and attractive home page using easy-to-configure settings. And with a little bit of HTML know-how you can do even more. In this post we’ll take a closer look at how to enhance your organization’s home both visually and functionally.
When you first set up your organization you can choose its name. In this example our organization is titled “Esri Understanding Our World” which we’ve entered in our organization settings under General (note that we’ve also added our organization logo):
Here’s what our home page looks like after setting the name and logo:
To improve the look of your home page you can choose a different banner or create a custom one. When creating a custom banner the size should be 960 pixels wide by 180 pixels high to avoid distortion. Add the custom image in the Banner section of the Home Page settings:
With a custom banner our home page is much more appealing.
Something you may want to add is a gallery ribbon featuring interesting or useful maps and apps. To add a featured content gallery, create a group (we named ours “Esri Featured Maps”) then add the items you want to display to that group. We followed best practices to create good thumbnails for each item. For more information see Put your best thumbnail forward.
Once you’ve added the desired maps and apps to the group, select the group by going to the Featured Content section in the Home Page settings:
Our home page now includes featured content:
You can use a larger image that fits behind the featured content ribbon by changing the Banner settings. Click HTML, then add a custom image by clicking the image button.
To completely fill the background create an image 960 pixels by 470 pixels. Here’s our home page using a larger custom image:
Using HTML you can also add buttons and other elements to your home page. To enter HTML make sure the HTML radio button is toggled, then click the View HTML Source button. Now you can enter HTML to create your page.
By using code similar to that shown below (displayed using Notepad++) you can include a button that opens a website, a map, a group, or anything else that can be accessed via a URL.
Below is the button on our home page (“Esri Home”) that was added using the HTML shown above. When clicked the esri.com home page opens.
There’s lots more that you can do by adding your own HTML. For more information see Using HTML to create a home page banner.
Finally, you may want to include a description that tells visitors about your organization, informs users of changes and events, and includes links to maps or other destinations. You can use the description as a bulletin board for broadcasting important news. For more information see Configuring the home page.
Here’s our final organization home page, including descriptive text and links.
Remember that your home page is best thought of as a resource for users within your organization, and is not ideal as a public facing website since it exposes more casual users to map authoring tools, and they will be unable to save their maps unless they have an account with your organization.
If you want to share maps and apps publicly you can use public groups and group gallery templates (see Doing more with ArcGIS Online groups), as well as a variety of other templates you can find by searching ArcGIS Online.
Thanks for the great ideas!
I am having problems uploading an image that will completely fill the background. When I go into the Home / Banner and upload a 960×470 image it only fills the banner area not the whole page as noted in this blog.
Also I do not see how/where to add the HTML for the addition of a button.
I am really excited about these two new features/ideas – any help implementing them would be much appreciated.
Hi, thanks for the comments.
To add a larger image to fill the entire background edit your settings and go to Home Page > Banner. Make sure the radio button for HTML is clicked on (by default it is not). Once it is, click the Insert Image button (second row, third from left). Your 960×470 image needs to be at a URL location, and if so just enter the URL. The image should display in the page. Note that if you already had something else there, you’ll need to delete it first to enable Insert Image.
When you click that HTML radio button you can also enter the HTML for the button. When you do that you need to reference the image you want to use as the background in that HTML. In the sample HTML you will see that background image referenced at line 3.
Apologies for not being able to make that HTML copy/paste in our WordPress blog, I’ll try to get that worked out and update the post.
If you have further problems or questions you can send me an email – it’s in my profile – bszukalski@esri.com
- bern
Hi, I am wondering about how to improve the appearance of the Featured Content banner. When I look at yours it shows nice looking images of the maps. My banner shows the maps as well, but it also includes every feature service used to create those maps because they are also shared by the the Group whose content is displayed. Is there some way to have only maps displayed in the banner?
Thanks.
Alan, I believe we took care of this question via email today, let me know if there are additional questions on this topic. – bern
One way to think about it is that each account has a home page that can be configured by the administrator. When you have a personal account, Esri is your administrator and your home page, featured maps, etc. are configured by Esri. When you have an organizational account, your home page, featured maps, etc. are configured by your organization admin. The short answer is “no” but you can use things like the group gallery templates, embedded galleries, and links to your maps to create your own “home” using configurable apps and/or custom Web pages. I’ll cover this in a blog post post-UC, thanks for the idea!