Themed Designs Now Available

Themed designs for each decade starting with the 50s are now available. To switch to a themed design for your decade:

1) Log into your web site
2) Click on Change Design
3) Select the themed designs of your choice

Special thanks to Eric Donaldson for coming up with all 6 themed designs, and Mike Johnston for programming these into the system.

Also, a BIG THANK YOU to all of our beta testers who helped us work out any kinks in the themed designs before announcing them!

Thank you for the email alerting me to this discussion thread on the forum list and thanks for constantly updating all the tools available to us to create GREAT sites! I spent 5 minutes adding new features and I feel like it enhanced my site many times over. Saved me a lot of work, especially adding the history and videos page from the 60's. Way cool!
Sue Hall

Love the new features! The '70s decade theme is right on and really freshens up our site.... The history/videos page is a nice addition, too. So, thanks Brad and company for coming up with great ideas and ways to help keep our sites interesting. It's appreciated by all of us, I'm sure.

Sandie

Oh by the way, I forgot to mention that next week we're going to work in a title bar area on the top of all theme design sub pages that includes your school name, year, logo, and title of the page.

The themed designs are wonderful! Wondering though if a design to cover 40's - 90's would be possible. Since our school had it's first graduating class in the mid 40's and it's last class in the early 90's it would be awesome to incorporate all the decades into one design.

Gini Morgan

OMG...The new "theme" pages are AWESOME! They are also right on for each year. They are a really cool change to offer our classmates. You guys are doing a wonderful job and we are all really thankful. I just started our class page back in May of this year, and we have 61 classmates signed up already. I love being the administrator, and have gotten so many compliments on our page. Thanks again for helping to make reunions countrywide...so easier to plan!!

Gini Morgan wrote:

Nope!

All themed designs will also become what we're calling Advanced Photoshop Designs. At that time you'll be able to edit these to your liking, thus you could accomplish this on your own or hire somebody to do it for you. More on that some other time, as this is quite a ways out there still.

Just another feather in the cap of the one and only
'Cutting Edge' web tool....ClassCreator!

Way to go team!

GBS Class of 1978

Thank you.....but.....my oh my oh my oh my. Where the heck did all that code on your home page come from? Well, actually I know where at least a lot of it came from....Microsoft Word. But what about all the meta tags and links to your local computer and everything else? Frankly this is such a tangle of code that even my "remove Word code" script can't fit it. All this code is what's busting your design, causing it to blow out to the right.

TIPS: If you like making content in Word, copy and paste it into Notepad rather than pasting it into your site editor (this will strip out all of the Word code). And then from Notepad, copy it again, and then paste it into your site editor.

If I were you, I'd copy your text from your home page and then paste it into Notepad. Then wipe out all the code on your home page and save it blank. And then paste your notepad text back into your home page. And then re-add your third party plugins. This is the only way I can imagine to fix your page.

Bottom line, be very careful when pasting in source code from Word or other third party html programs. I've said it many times but I'll say it again here -- the fact that we allow access to the code like this is both our greatest strength, and greatest weakness. You can do some really powerful stuff with code, and we want people to be able to do that. But you can also break your site in a major way if you're not careful in there. Honestly I can't believe your home page is displaying at all. If you decide you'd like to fix this and need some help let me know, I'd be happy to lend a hand.

Brad,

Thx for the tip.
It's hard for me to see it blowing out in my browser.

I knew the Site Guru name would unveil my IT ignorance,
I've been seeking a tech to help with no success.

I'll work through the pages as you mentioned, however being slow at best, my hope is our site does not blow up in the mean time.

Dale

The good news is the rest of your site is just fine. It's only your home page. Oh by the way, love the animated school photo. That's very creative -- I don't think I've seen anyone do anything like that before.

Didn't mean to cause too much alarm -- it's just when I saw all of that external code on your home page I was like "Woah, I can't believe this thing even loads at all." It's really not that hard to fix. Somebody with even rudimentary html knowledge will know what code doesn't belong in there. Plus other than your site blowing out (you see the whole right hand side piece is disconnected right?) all that code really doesn't seem to be causing a problem. Although if you want to be picky (like I am) then you'll want to remove all the external code and fix your site so your content fits within the design area again.

Oh and by the way, for a non techie, I think you're doing great.

Dale Hurst wrote:

I went ahead and fixed the problem that was blowing out the site for you. At some point you or somebody will want to clean up some of the Word code in there, but now that the blowing out issue is resolved it's really causing very few issues in any browser.

Brad... Love the designs....

However our class is Redford High class of 1959.

The 50's design has a big M in it. Which would be OK if we were the Mumford High class of 1959.

Can we have a 50's design without the M

No. It's all pretty generic to be indicative of the 50s -- the M really isn't meant to have any particular meaning.

The good news, though, is in '09 as we release the Photoshop Professional Designs, all 6 themed designs will also become PS Professional Designs as well. Thus you'll be able to change out any item in the design and replace it with any other item of your choosing.

Once you have selected a themed design, is there a way to turn it off and go back to no themed design?
Thanks.

Yes, you can switch designs all you want without impacting your site in any way. If you don't like something you've tried simply switch back.

I figured that, but I haven't figured out how to do it.

I tried clicking on the design that I had previously selected, but it won't seem to "turn off."

Any suggestions?

Thanks for your help.

Click on "Change Design" and then click the little radio button next to whatever design you want to change to. It should happen instantly. If it doesn't though, let me know what browser and browser version # you are using. Can you reproduce this problem of being unable to change your design using any other browser?

It sounds like you're trying to turn off the design you already have by clicking it again. Instead, click on (select) the design you want to try. That will wipe out the previous and bring in the new one.

Yes, I can change designs - but what I'm asking is can I go back to no design.

All sites have to be using one of the 12 available designs. What design are you trying to revert back to?

That may be the answer to my question. When I started, my site had no design. I picked one to see what they would look like, thinking I could turn it off if I wanted to. I guess the answer is that I can't. Is that right?

Hi Mike,

If you don't assign a design the default is design number One. If you want to return back to that design just choose the Change Design link under Admin Functions and choose design number one.