Just thought I'd take a pause in the implementation discussion and talk about my efforts to do some simple customization on one of our event sites in Sphere's Kinterathon application.
We wanted to "pretty up" the landing page for an event and I thought I'd take my limited experience and tackle the job. This is simple stuff so those of you who know html and Sphere customization will be bored if you read on.
I'm working in the Kinterathon/Manage website info/Front Page Customization. The first thing I learned when I called BB support to ask if I could customize the buttons is that I had to take Cookie Training. Understand there are no real cookies to be eaten so that was a let down. I haven't taken the class yet, but since I do aspire to different colored buttons at some time, I'm going to do it. So, the customizations I am making are those allowed by anyone as a standard feature.
I started by tackling moving the title front the middle of the page to the top and making the letters bigger. As you know, you get a couple of little boxes for a header and a subheader. They wouldn't do, so I opened up my trusty Adobe photoshop and created a file and typed in my text and formatted it. Then I added the logo to the bottom of this file. I had to do some image and canvas re-sizing, but I got it looking like I wanted. I loaded that into the header and graphic and voila! I had a nice big title.
My next stop was making the side menu and text follow our red, black and white color format. It's pretty easy to click on a button for Menu and pick a color. I wanted the colors to be a true red, black and white, so I went to http://cloford.com/resources/colours/500col.htm to get the hex codes for these colors. Then I just pasted them into the boxes sans the #. Looking good....
The last thing for today was editing the registration box. I am no html guru, but I get the basics. I have Dreamweaver, but I must have been dreaming when I bought it - it's just too complex. I use The HTML Editor at http://www.coffeecup.com/html-editor/. It's easy and pretty cheap. I like it. It doesn't seem to add a lot of junk to the code. I made the words look pretty and pasted my html into the window and now things are looking pretty nice.
I still can't change those buttons and I want to take care of that big space before my registration box, but I learned some new things and I wanted to share. I am the all-time generalist and I think it is great to try new things. It helps if someone has been there before you and shares.
Look forward to more on this once I graduate from cookie school.
Here is the link to the site I've been talking about: http://www.kintera.org/faf/home/default.asp?ievent=320354
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