One of the most important things for any website, is to have a help pages or a tour pages that gives a hand to your visitors and help them discover your website by providing a clear short descriptions. Also this is useful for your website when you tell your visitors what they will get by participating to it.
I like the design template of Budokin community, it’s clean and unique design, The thing that really catch my eyes is the “Take a Tour” link on the home page, very nice thing to have on your community, it provide a great help for visitors.
Budokin is using Tabs to generate the pages of the tour, here is a link to show you how to create tabs. On this post I will talk about how to do it by creating pages inside a new group created specially for the “Take A Tour” pages.
I have talked before about some useful ideas on how to use auto subscribe group plugin for Elgg to create a help group. This time I am going to talk about a new idea of using the group pages to create a tour pages for your Elgg community, and make it easy for your visitor to learn ore about it.
Create a new group and name it “Tour” for example, this is the group you will use to create you tour pages. Don’t forget to set the access options to public so visitors can access to your website tour.
Now, you have created the tour group, it’s the time to start with creating pages, I recommend creating 3-5 pages for the tour, start with a main page, and set other pages as a sub pages, if you follow this way you will be able to create a nice navigation for your tour will show on the left sidebar on the group page. I advice to add another navigation bar with text links of photos for all pages if you think this will look better, so visitors can go step by step, and a link to continue the tour to take you through the tour pages.
The good thing while creating a page is that you can design them the way you like by using your editor, that means you can add photos or video what ever other content for your tour.
When you end creating your tour pages, I think it would be a good time to start using the custom index plugin to create a link to your Tour page on the home page.
I have started creating a tour page from here, check the demo on My LT community.
Note that this is a very simple way to creat a tour pages.
You are welcome to post any ideas by commenting on this post, I want to learn from you, and know if someone has made something that we can all share.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I really like the idea of an online tour. I am certain that a large percentage of visitors wonder where’s the value of joining, yet another, social network site. A tour would certainly help convert more looky lous into registered users with a few bulleted information packed pages that then leads to a sign-up form (call-to-action.)
Yes David, it’s a very good idea, exactly!
I have followed the css-tabs-css-only-dom-tabs tutorial and it works great in my Elgg module, except that when I click on any of the “Content Block 1″ or “Content Block 2″, etc., it tags on the URL above the “c#1″ or “c#2″, etc. I would like my tour to perform like budokin.com/tour where the URL stays the same as you click on the tour and advance through to the pages.
Any ideas?