Designing Overview pages for places

Overview pages with image-based navigation can quickly direct your users to useful pages. You can define the content and layout of Overview pages for places that you have administrator rights.

Important: We do not recommend that you use widgets and widgetized Overview pages in your community. For more information, see Understanding pages in places.

Places (social groups, projects, and spaces) become more inviting when you customize their overview pages to display the items members care about most. Depending on your overview page customization rights, you can get these pages to look the way you want by using widgets that help you choose and arrange content. For more information about permissions, see Customization permissions for Overview pages.

Each widget displays content of a particular kind — for example, HTML, recent content, or feed subscription results — in a box that you can drag into position on a page. After you publish the page, you can always come back and update its content or design. A complete reference to available widgets can be found in Widget reference. For the steps for customizing overview pages, see Setting up Overview page.

Attention: Widgets are not responsive in design and are not recommended to use in communities which rely on being available from mobile devices. We recommend that you use Activity or custom pages with tiles instead of Overview pages. For more information, see Designing activity and custom pages for places.

Overview page best practices

Here are a few key guidelines for designing pages with widgets.

  • Make sure the widgets you choose help users to identify the purpose of the place and quickly find the information they need.
  • Note that with widgets, less is more. Highly complex pages can lead to performance challenges as well as user confusion. You should use only as many widgets as you need to provide essential information for the place without overloading it.
  • Make sure you limit the number of images on the page. Loading many images on every page load can make your page slower and create visual clutter.
  • Limit group and space ownership to one or a very few users to safeguard your design and protect security.