Note: This is a premium feature or service. This article only applies to your community if your Firstup contract includes this premium functionality. Please contact your Customer Success Manager with any questions about feature availability for your community.

What is Custom Homepage?

Connect your employees more effectively with Custom Homepage, a dynamic, everyday, communications landing page for your intranet. Determine the order and structure of your company’s front page, position relevant news, and provide employees with personalized updates from the unique topics they follow.

Strategy examples:

• News Precedence: devote top headlines to CEO announcements, crisis communications, or M&A updates.
• Post-Event Highlights: move community-generated photos and content above the fold to recap trade shows, company parties, and fun outside the office.
• Onboarding Efficiency: take command of staffing surges by educating new hires with easy-to-access training and information.
• Culture & Mission: focus on initiatives like diversity and inclusion, environmental sustainability, and workplace health.

What Are the Options? 

The Custom Homepage has six sections and there are two settings for each section: Content Source and Display Option.

Note: All Custom Homepage options will only display content that the user has access to via the assigned topic or audience.

Content Source

For each section of your Custom Homepage, choose a content source:

• Featured - Recently featured content, personalized to the user based on the topics they have access to.
• Latest - Recently published content from followed topics. Arguably the most personalized selection, as it is limited to topics the user is following (not just topics they have access to). 
• Trending - highly engaging content, personalized to the user based on the topics they have access to.
• Topic - Recently published content from a specified topic. As you are specifying a topic, this will not be personalized to the user and you can only assign "public" topics. However, this is a great way to front and center a topic that is important to your entire company. Keep this section fresh by publishing new content to the topic every week.
• Initiative - Content recently published to a specified initiative. The content that will be surfaced will be targeted based on the topic. By using an initiative, you can pull from multiple topics, but you will want to remember to publish fresh content to this initiative every week.
• For You - This is a highly personalized section that pulls in content targeted to a user via Audience but not Topic. Use this setting if you frequently publish campaigns targeted to Audiences but not Topics.
• From the Community - Image posts submitted by members in the community. Turn this on after establishing a clear user-submitted content strategy - say you have topics that are open to auto-publishing, monthly post spotlights, awards for the most engaging content, etc.

Display Option

For each section of your Custom Homepage, choose from one of three visual layouts - Hero, Grid, Row, and Gallery. We generally recommend Hero for the first section at the very top, and only one Gallery. Mixing visual layouts helps preserve visual interest and distinguish the sections. Note, these are general guidelines only and we delight in the creative variety of designs that our customers employ!

Hero

Grid

Row

Gallery

What, Exactly, Will Users See?

Whether set to default or customized, the homepage will not duplicate duplicate content across sections. For example, if you customize the homepage so that the first section is a specific topic, and the second section is featured content, then a specific post may only appear under the specific topic and not under featured. 

Users will not always see all five sections that you have configured. Some sources are dynamic, so if there is not enough content to fill the section, the section may not appear to users. For example, Featured only appears if there is enough recently featured content.

Some sections on the Homepage are not customizable - Custom Homepage allows you to customize the top 6 sections. Below those sections, we will display sections such as Recommended Topics, New Topics, or Most Popular Topics depending on the community, topic activity, and settings.

Custom Homepage is for the web experience only, which means that changes to the Custom Homepage are not reflected in the mobile app experience. 

Note, the presentation styles Hero and Gallery are not compatible with mobile web browsers. This means that users accessing the web experience on their mobile devices will only see the Homepage sections that are set to Grid.

How to Create or Edit the Custom Homepage

As with all premium features, you can discuss feature availability for your community with your Customer Success Manager and/or review your strategy before implementing changes.

1. Sign in to Creator Studio as a Brand Super Admin or an applicable custom role.
2. Navigate to Configure on the menu on the left and then select the Custom Feeds tile.
   
   
   
   
3. Scroll down to Custom Homepage and click on a section to edit it.
   
   
   
   
4. Select the dropdown to change the content source. Note, each source can be chosen only once - you cannot display Featured twice, or the same topic twice. Details on the available content sources here.
   
   
   
   
5. Select the dropdown to change the presentation style.
   • Hero - Larger images displayed asymmetrically.
   • Grid - Smaller images displayed evenly in a grid.
   • Row - Larger images displayed in a row.
   • Gallery - Box with very large spotlight image and much smaller thumbnails; this presentation style is specific for image posts submitted by members in the member experience and is recommended for the 'From Your Community' feed. See example above.
     
     
     
     
6. You will also need to select the minimum post number per section. Sections will only display if the minimum post number is met.
   
   
   
   
7. Click Done.
8. Edit other sections as needed by selecting the section, changing the dropdowns, and clicking Done.
9. Click Submit to commit all changes. After clicking Submit, changes take effect in the web experience immediately! Users who are currently signed in may need to refresh the page to see the changes.

How to Reset to Defaults

If you would like to restore the defaults, you can quickly revert all changes by selecting Reset to Defaults and say Yes to confirm.

Once set back to default, any past customizations will be lost. To restore customization, you must manually edit the settings again. The Homepage can be re-customized at any time.