While the heart of any website is its content, looks are important, too. We’re visually refreshing the platform with new fonts, an alternate menu option, an alternate homepage layout, and updated header and footer options — along with a few new widgets.
The recently launched new look for Drupal Department Platform websites is designed to complement other Michigan Medicine sites while also accommodating all your existing content and page layouts.
Where possible, we’re also providing more flexibility so you have additional choices for displaying your site navigation menu and your homepage, providing an attractive front door for your site.
To learn more about all the changes, read our announcement.
The new look-and-feel uses new heading fonts and new content widget options to create an updated look, while still working with existing website content and page layouts.
New optional header links. You can list up to 3 links below the search box in your website header. You might use these for important high-traffic pages, such as for making a clinic appointment, or for internal department resources, such as an intranet site.
You can add these links by editing your department homepage and choosing the tab called Header Quick Links.
A widget called Callout Blocks allows you to pair up to 3 images with a text & link overlay to promote important sections of your website. You might use these to highlight specific audience groups (e.g. "For Researchers," "For Trainees," "For Faculty") or to highlight your missions (e.g. "Clinical Care," "Research," "Education").
With the new look, the carousel overlay for full-width carousel slides shifts to the lower left corner of the image to reduce the chance that the text overlay will cover up an important part of the image. The text overlay itself remains optional, and you can turn it off if you like.
On the homepage, you can also add an optional footer banner image with a text overlay and an optional link styled as a button.
You can create this banner by editing your department homepage and choosing the tab called Bottom Image Banner.
We've added an optional top navigation option, which will display up to 100 characters of top-level menu links (e.g. "top tabs"), and use dropdowns to display second-level child pages in each section. For sites using top navigation, sub-pages will still display in side navigation once you click into the section of content to read more.
If you’d like to convert from the regular left navigation menu to a top navigation menu, you’ll need to book an appointment to meet with us. Submit a ticket to HITS to the attention of Web Presence Team / Michigan MultiMedia.
We’ll work with you to review your current site structure and figure out how best to translate it to top nav while reducing the risk of broken links resulting from changing page titles and URLs.
A few things you can be thinking about now, if you’re interested in top nav:
We've updated the styling of side navigation to match the new visual look.
We're offering an optional alternate homepage treatment that swaps in a new image-driven billboard supported by call-to-action buttons in place of a rotating carousel.
This alternate homepage layout uses top navigation style only. This design also features two unique content widgets: Callout List and Front Color Blocks, which are used to create the full-width content styling that appears before the usual News / Events / Body regions.
We're also adding 4 other content widgets. Visit each item to learn more about how it works:
