Finalsite Basics for Webmasters

Basic Composer training:

• The Feather is where you will edit your pages. You should recognize your pages listed here.
• What will I see in Finalsite Composer?
• Using the Editor - Finalsite Training

Specific to MSBSD website:

• We've created a "School Info" page under About Us for all schools and migrated your old site homepage content here so that you have one easy place to upkeep during school startup. We also added a button on your homepage hero so that parents can easily find this info. Once it slows down and you've had an opportunity to train we will adjust.
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• You will see pages at the bottom that have an icon that resembles an branch. These are branches; you can edit the I want to... School NAV and Social Media links.  The I want to will be maintained by the district. Schools can add shortcuts for the I want to... School NAV as they see fit (no need to duplicate what is on the district I want to). You can link to external URLs, internal school pages and documents/resources in I want to.
• To add more sections (Tier II pages) you'll need to request this from CallCenter. 

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Calendars are in the Elements section (the 4 squares icon). Each school will have two calendars that you can use. Both can feed the Upcoming Events element on your homepage and your school calendar grid. Using BLE as an example:

1. BLE Finalsite calendar - this is a calendar within Finalsite. Just use the Create Event button or double click on a date, then enter the information needed. This will give you a full featured editor to include links, formatting, images and html if wanted.
2. BLE Outlook calendar - each school has an outlook calendar already created. Admin secretaries and principals have rights to edit that calendar or grant permissions for other staff (similar to the generic school emails). You can add this calendar to your outlook account and easily add events to your website within your outlook.

Schools can make additional calendars and choose which calendars display on Upcoming Events and/or their main calendars. Email CallCenter@matsuk12.us for more information on this. 

For additional Calendar training see related Adding Calendars on website KB article

Forms are in the Elements section (the 4 squares icon). For examples of the forms element check out our Transcript request form or our ParentVUE survey. (Please do not submit)

More coming soon

• Page Pops are in the Elements section (the 4 squares icon). You can configure page pops to open on any/all pages. User must dismiss the message and can choose don't show again.

Everyone will use posts on the Latest News: here is an overview - How do I populate my Latest News on my home page?

• Posts and Boards are in the Elements section (the 4 squares icon). Posts are individual records that you can group together on a Board. Each school has a School News Board, where they create posts that will display on their Latest News section of their homepage. 
  
• Posts can be used to display a lot of things. We are still learning this, but the school board member page is another example of a post. As we learn more we will add to this section!.

Tips:

1.  Dimensions for images in posts - 2:1 ratio width to hight (ex. 1600X800) should yeild good results. You have programs on your district computer or you can use Photo Editor Pixlr Free Photoshop online Image Editing Tool to crop the image to 2:1.
   

These videos show you how to utilize Resources:

1. Add new resource - You'll add the link text then link that text to a document or URL
2. Edit existing link with a new resource - Link and text exist and you need to change the resource to a differently named document. 
3. Replace existing link with the same (but updated) resource - Link and text exist. Document will be the same name and format. Example) Document has misspelling and you are just updating it.