Customising the Activate Home Page

introduction activate provides several prebuilt examples of home pages that can be used as a starting point for creating a custom home page design these examples demonstrate different layout and design options for tiles, quick links, and background images by default, these examples appear at the bottom of the standard home page for easy selection during setup in production environments, this panel should be removed once the desired layout has been chosen all example configurations can be found in activate studio under //resources/configuration/web each example consists of related webform parameters such as example homepage1 image example homepage1 quicklink example homepage1 tiles , etc these examples serve as a guide to help you tailor the home page to your needs general design guidelines home page tiles should provide links to top level items that users need most frequently most home pages work well with up to 20 tiles (approximately 5 rows of 4 on a medium screen) order tiles by frequency of use — the most common or business critical items should appear first admin tiles can appear early in the list if the page is targeted at administrative users service related tiles (services, distribution lists, mailboxes, etc ) typically come before user or role based items use landing pages for advanced or administrative functions to reduce clutter on the main home page users can personalise their experience by adding favourites , which appear beneath the search bar this allows users (especially admins) to quickly access their most used dashboards, tasks, or pages without modifying the shared standard layout standard version the standard home page is the default layout provided with activate it includes tiles for accessing all areas of the platform and supports user favourites for quick customisation consider adding an admin tile that links to a landing page for administrative users users can add or remove favourites easily, creating a personalised view under the search bar without changing the shared layout quick links quick links provide secondary navigation options for items that are not used frequently or are specific to particular applications or systems use the sidebar for secondary or optional links — in most cases, a tile is preferred quick links are hidden on mobile by default, replaced with a ribbon bar layout for better usability you can also include quick links in the drawer menu at //resources/users/web user drawer this makes them accessible from anywhere, including mobile devices tiles in the sidebar example are centred; however, left aligned tiles follow the activate design standard favourites can also be displayed within the quick links area for quick access small tiles layout the small tiles example shows how to adjust the tile size and density for more compact layouts set size='small' to enable smaller tiles (no custom css required) adding a description below each tile increases tile height; removing it creates a more compact layout use small tiles sparingly — too many can make the page feel cluttered the example also shows the search bar positioned inside the top info bar for a streamlined appearance using background images when using a background image on the home page choose an image that provides strong text contrast — dark image with light text or vice versa the page size is set to full , so you must manually add padding to components such as tile containers the background image uses object fit cover to adapt to all screen sizes in newer builds, you can use the backgroundimage property on the panel instead of custom css to simplify setup avoid using custom less in activate v8 unless absolutely necessary it should only be used for very specific custom cases and not for modifying built in components