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Primary Homepage

Primary homepages are the homepages for parent websites. An example: Research and Innovation homepage. Currently there are two primary homepages in our web setup - the Research and Innovation homepage and the Office of Sponsored Programs homepage*.  

The Office of Sponsored Programs website will be moved under www.research.vt.edu during Fall 2023, which will eliminate its use for a Primary Homepage. Once moved, it would use a microsite/secondary landing page layout.  

Primary homepages include the following format and order of components:

  1. Call-to-action element at the top of the page.
  2. Introductory paragraph describing the website / topic .
  3. Research Administration News Box (if there are regular occurring updates that users need to have brought to their attention).\
  4. Automated feeds (if applicable).  Example:Events feed.
  5. Highlighted content/initiatives box(es).

Individual components are explained in detail below.  

An example of a call-to-action used on the Office of Research and Innovation homepage.

There is flexibility in how the call-to-action is presented, based on the photo being used and the amount of text involved to describe the story/page that is being linked.   

Base Settings:

  1. Image can be set to the left or right.  
  2. Call-to-action heading and call-to-action link button are to the right
    1. Heading use the default styling
    2. Call-to-action styling:
      1. Text: Uppercase (use the setting within button)
      2. Dark
      3. Outline

This is showcased using a multicolumn component with styling added so that it gives the “white card” effect.  

Information regarding how to create this can be found in the Multi-Column / White Card Columns documentation.

This area of content will utilize the list component to pull in content from either the current website or another website within the Ensemble CMS.

Examples of use include pulling research videos from video.vt.edu, research stories from VT News, campus notices from VT News, and more.