Last week, we launched a slew of new features in our HEATWAVE grand finale. One of them was an upgraded design manager including a bunch of great new templates. I thought I'd just give a quick overview of how the design manager works so that you can make the most of it and have some fun playing around with the new designs in all of your spare time.
Important: I don't recommend playing around with designs on a live site. Why not just create another free site under your account to use for design adventuring. This can help you avoid live site disasters.
The Design Gallery
Go to My Website --> Designs and you'll open up the design manager. Then, click on "Design Gallery." This page contains the "official" version of the system designs that are available to your website. Click on any design and you'll get a detailed view of the included templates, along with a few options. Scroll through the designs with the arrow buttons at the bottom to see all of the new choices.
If you click "Add to My Designs" it will move a copy of your chosen design to your "My Designs" page. If you click "Apply" it will make that design live on your website as well as moving it to My Designs. If you click "download" it will download a .zip file to your computer containing that design.
My Designs
"My Designs" is another page that you can access from the Design Manager. It's important to understand that when you move a design from the Design Gallery to My Designs, it actually makes a copy of that design. Once the design is in My Designs, you can edit it and change it however you want and it won't affect the "official" copy that still exists in the Design Gallery. So, if you ever mess something up and want to revert to the original, just delete the edited design from My Designs and go back to the Design Gallery to start over.
You can also upload your own designs to the My Designs page. For more information on this, see the uploading your own designs section on our account support website.
A few tips and tricks
- Copying and renaming a design. Download a design from the gallery to your computer. Rename the file to something else (be sure to preserve the .zip extension). Then, upload the new file to My Designs. You now have a copy of the original design in My Designs under a different name. This can be handy if you want to play around with multiple versions of a design. You can upload as many copies under as many different names as you want. Renaming also helps you to avoid accidentally overwriting your design if you were to reapply it from the gallery.
- Edit your designs via FTP. You can edit the code of your designs with the built in editor from My Designs, but it is often easier to access the designs via FTP. See our support article on FTP for more information.
- Add your own logo without editing any code. Did you know that any of our new included designs support the website logo feature. You can upload your own logo image by going to My Website --> Settings and clicking the advanced tab. Once uploaded, your logo will show on the new design template. Fun times!
Enjoy!
We hope you enjoy the new design manager features as well as all of the new, included templates. Have fun experimenting (on a non-live site, of course) and if you have any questions, please just let us know.
Posted on
Thursday, September 4, 2008
by Tim Wall