Electos uses web page templates which it populates with material stored in a database. Any one site may have several different templates for different display purposes (e.g. Home Page, News page, Image Gallery) , but the whole concept of template control means that the web site will present a common look and feel throughout.
You – or a web page designer, or Asckey can create a web page template design from scratch, but today there are many options to acquire page templates that can work with Electos.
So, lets look at these options, in ascending order of cost and ambition.
Free Electos web page templates
Electos arrives with a standard template
Once installed, customising the Company Name, the images at the top of the page and a few other details can be done very simply from within Electos – all you need are the necessary images in a matching size and colour scheme. Incidentally, you can have these details change automatically on a section by section or even page by page basis if you want to!
Customisation
Colours
If the layout and features of one these is “about right”, but not quite matching your company colours then changing the colour scheme to a closer match to your own business colours is quite possible. Examples
- Above, the top image is the same design as the right most of the small thumbnails - the red theme changed to blue.
- This web site - Eclipse-fm® uses exactly the same template as the one you are looking at now, all that has changed is the style sheet. If you have web page design experience, you will find you can do this from within Electos itself, as the style sheet source is available for customising. Or, we can do this for you of course.
Layout
You (or we) can also make structural changes, adding sections for different purposes. As an example, on this site, the Home Page has 5 different content areas, while the other pages have just one. As with the Style sheet the template source code is accessible from inside Electos itself.
Templates downloaded from the Internet
Content Managed websites all have similar basic characteristics. They provide a visually attractive surround for empty spaces which are filled in with material from a database. That material is not just text, but text plus images, movie clips, links to other web sites, “text” that is configured as a form to fill in, etc.
The “Visually attractive surround” is usually subject to style sheet control, so many aspects can be further customised without changing the structure of the template code. However, even that can be changed – perhaps to move the Menu area from the right side to the left, or to add another content area. If you wish you can create extra templates with variations for specific purposes. Nothing is “set in stone”, it depends on your needs and budget or your HTML language skills.
As well as the “empty spaces”, there will be provisions for navigating the site, which will be a set of menu buttons arranged in a vertical column or across the page, or even both. In a good CMS system, these menu areas will configure themselves automatically, “growing” as the site evolves. This is one of the distinctive features of a Content Managed System, the basic site navigation is generated automatically, whereas many websites built page by page typically have a very static navigation menu structure, and/or one that is hard to configure and manage.
This structural similarity has resulted in the growth of an internet industry to create web page templates, a large number of which are free or available at very low cost.
Type “CMS Templates” into Google, and you will see that there are many providers of CMS compatible templates. Making these “Electos aware” is relatively straightforward, and the whole process is described in this case history. More specific sites to look at are
Your own template
If you already have a website, but are looking for the ease of editing benefits of a CMS managed site, it may be possible to treat that page design as a page template and add the Electos “engine” to it. In one very simple case, we have done this in as little as 20 minutes!
None of the above
You will need to commission a web designer to create a page, probably based around your existing business literature. We can do this, and we can call on the authors of Electos, Data Access Europe who maintain a design studio specialising in creating Custom Electos page templates. For some ideas as to what can be achieved, try this image gallery . Click on any of the image rectangles and you will see an image gallery of 20 or more web site custom designs. The “Next/Previous” navigation from image to image is revealed if you move the cursor towards the top Right (Next) or Left (previous) of the image
For a look at what can be done have a look at our case history - Student Lettings Site
Web Page Design