Website Templates

OK, understanding this concept is super important! It will save you a TON of time.

My Market Toolkit website tools allow for an elegant separation of content from design. This is a big deal! You can create pages, posts, listings, etc and then manage the design of your site independent of the content.

The DRY Goal

We believe in "DRY" web design. That means that you design elements of your site once and reuse them when needed. Here are some examples:

  1. use one header or footer across many templates
  2. use one menu across many templates
  3. use two different headers on several templates
  4. use a web form on multiple landing pages
  5. put blog archives in multiple locations in multiple templates

The goal is to create an element or module once and reuse it. That means you only have to change it in one place if you update your design.

Dry Design

Designs are kept dry using stylesheets and modules. Stylesheets and mdules are all designed with easy-to-use builders. Changing colors, fonts, spacing, images, text is a snap.

Themes

Website colors, fonts, spacing and other styling options are managed in the Theme builder. A Theme is a visual collection of styles you can manage by clicking to change so 'what you see, is what you get'. No modifying css files (unless you have an advanced change - you can add any css you want).

Modules

Templates are built using reusable components called modules. Modules are built and then can be drag/dropped into template containers.

Drag and Drop

Our previous version was all code/html driven. We accomplished the same concepts but the templates and modules took time to create. 

We've fixed that!

In today's My Market Toolkit you can build templates and modules in minutes by dragging and dropping structural and content elements. No more focus on tweaking code and css - design is all about creativity.

Building an entire site from scratch can happen within an hour or two.

Managing Templates

To create a template:

  1. Hover over "Design
  2. Click "Templates"
  3. Click the "New" icon
  4. Give the Template a name
  5. Click "Save"
  6. Make your design updates
  7. Remember to click "Save"!

To apply a template:

Templates are applied in one of two ways:

  1. Volume Defaults (preferred) - To set default templates for your volumes go to the volume settings
    1. Hover over "Content"
    2. Click the "Settings" icon (looks like a gear)
    3. On the "Templates" tab select the appropriate template for the volume type.
    4. Click "Save"
  2. Page level - you can override the volume defaults on each individual page (maybe you want a different layout for your contact page than for other pages.)
    1. Edit a page
    2. On the "Settings" tab (right side) select a template from the "Choose Template" menu
    3. Click "Save"