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

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.

For example:

• Position C-level and leadership topics with the most prominence. Devote your top headlines to CEO announcements, crisis communications, or mergers and acquisitions.
• Move all community-generated photos and content above the fold to recap trade shows, company parties, and fun outside the office.
• Take command of onboarding surges by educating new hires with easy-to-access training and information.
• Drive a deeper commitment to your enterprise values. Customize page sections for initiatives like diversity, equity and inclusion, environmental sustainability, and workplace health and safety.

How do you take control of your Homepage? With Custom Homepage, you can select from Featured, Trending, Latest, From the Community, or even individual topics with the option to reorder page blocks whenever you choose. Hero, Grid, and Gallery layouts for each section can be adjusted for a homepage design that meets your communications objectives.

Example of Different Section Styles

What, Exactly, Will Users See?

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

Whether set to default or customized, we avoid duplicating the display of content across sections of the homepage, so if the Homepage is customized so that a public topic is now one of the top five sections, any content published to that topic will appear in that topic’s section, and not in Featured, Latest, or Trending. If you want a piece of content that's applicable to multiple sections to show up in a specific section, you should be able to achieve this by placing the section you want it to appear in at the top.

Some sections on the Homepage are not customizable - Custom Homepage allows you to customize the top 5 sections. Below those sections, we will display sections such as Recommended Topics, New Topics, or Most Popular Topics depending on the program, topic activity, and settings.

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. In addition, 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 program with your Customer Success Manager and/or review your strategy before implementing changes.

1. Sign into Studio as an Administrator or Program Manager.
2. Navigate to the gear icon in the top right and choose Configure Program.
   
   
3. Select the User Experience tab.
   
4. Scroll down to Modular Feed or Custom Homepage.
   
5. Click on a section to edit the section.
   
6. Select the dropdown to change the source. Note, each source can be chosen only once - you cannot display Featured twice, or the same topic twice.
   • Featured - recently featured content from topics the user has access to.
   • Trending - highly engaging content from topics the user has access to.
   • Latest - most recently published content from the topics the user is following.
   • Topic - recently published content from a specified topic.
     • You can only choose "public" topics which are open to all users.
     • The Topic section is always displayed, even if content is older and has been seen before. Consider a strategy of publishing new, fresh content to the topic every week.
   • From the Community - image posts submitted by Members in the community.
7. Select the dropdown to change the presentation style.
   • Hero - larger images displayed asymmetrically.
   • Gallery - black box with very large spotlight image and much smaller thumbnails.
   • Grid - smaller images displayed evenly in a grid.
8. Click Done.
9. Edit other sections as needed by selecting the section, changing the dropdowns, and clicking Done.
10. Click Submit to commit all changes. After clicking Submit, changes take effect in the web experience immediately! Users that 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.