Banners and Slides

Banners

If a banner is preferred over a slider, it can be added through the "banner information" panel on the index page. The same naming conventions of titles and captions apply. The banner will need to be 1920 x 600px. When placing images in a page, do not specify their width. Specifying only their height allows them to resize properly with the page on sites powered by responsive design.

Slides

On the homepage templates, you can add a rotating slideshow, the cycle will rotate every 6 seconds. Alternatively, a user can rotate through images using keyboard arrow keys. The slideshow may be paused by hovering the mouse over the photo. The slideshow is made through a block and can be edited by navigating to: _cms > blocks > xhtml > homepage slides (naming may be slightly different depending on template).

The content in the slideshow can be modified by editing the blocks and filling in the form. There should be no more than 5 items in a slideshow The slides can be easily reordered. In the top left corner, there are options for editing slides (plus and minus boxes), reordering slides (black arrow), and order of slides (ie. 1 of 2)

Video Banners (Homepage Only)

We have added the ability to add video banners to Western's homepage. The way to do this is to publish your video file first and then link to it with an absolute path in the field provided. Do not link to a relative video file you've uploaded into to Cascade, but instead lnk to the published version of that file. Note: this path must be https:// - they will not work if the video isn't hosted at a secure location.

Video banner guidelines:

  • Video dimensions conform to the same specifications that the image versions of the banners do (1920 x 600).
  • The slides in the rotation each last 6 seconds. Plan the length of your video clips accordingly.
  • Please ensure there is no audio track for your banner video - let's not surprise people.
  • In terms of file size, video slides added to the homage should be no more than 5mb to 10mb in size. Please note that 10mb is HUGE and this should be should be used sparingly and only in special circumstances.
  • When it's time for a video to be swapped out, please unpublish the old file from the server. This helps us cut down on clutter and the files we're keeping on the sever.
  • Be sure to add the URL to the last URL field in the banner tool in Cascade. If you don't, your banner won't preview or show up when the page goes live.

We are exploring the opportunity to roll this out to other users of the Western template in the future.

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