When preparing your site for an import into Blackbaud's NetCommunity or Internet Solutions products there are a few points to note.
Background
SmartDESIGN: Import takes a verbatim copy of your design and places it into the Blackbaud website product ready to be used when creating new pages. As it is an exact copy there is little testing required and the design maintains any responsive elements for tablet/mobile view of the pages. You can then link between your source site and your Blackbaud site and, to the user, the transition from one to another will be seamless - the sites will look identical apart from the web address.
Page design for the import
Once imported to the Blackbaud product the website design is independent of any changes to the imported page design. You must therefore make sure that BEFORE the import the main site design is complete, tested and in most cases live.
When importing we suggest that you have one example page of each design layout you wish to have in your Blackbaud product and that you send these page links to the SmartTHING team for review prior to the import i.e. examples of:
- a one column template
- a two column template with sidebar and main content
- a two column layout with feature box content and three column content area
Note: any changes to the source design after it has been imported have to be manually ported over to the Blackbaud product so would be additional effort from yourselves or the SmartTHING team.
When we import your design you will usually already have some design in place for how form elements will be displayed. We do however suggest you test this by adding form elements to a test page in your existing site. These elements would include a:
Note: please ensure your styling is applied to the elements i.e.
- input[type=text] {... your style ...}
and does NOT rely on any wrapping or inline classes such as the below:
- input.my-style[type=text] {... your style ...}
- form.my-form input[type=text] {... your style ...}
Responsive add-on for BBNC parts
When we import your design it will usually be responsive i.e. adjust itself to mobile or tablet view. The Blackbaud product itself though is not responsive (yet - it hopefully will be in the future) so we will usually suggest you also add our SmartMOBILEFORMS part to the site to ensure these forms format themselves nicely on mobile and tablet devices.
Fonts
Many designs have custom fonts which have support files hosted on your website and are licensed for use on that site. When the design is imported to your Blackbaud product there are two things that are required:
- You need to check the license for your fonts and make sure it also covers us on your Blackbaud website address (usually a sub-domain of the main site)
- Your main site has to support https://[site.address]/ access so we can reference the font files from your secure Blackbaud website pages
There are workarounds for these but they do take additional effort so please highlight this to our team.
Adding different branding
We can do more than a basic import so if you wish the design to be adjusted after import, for example if you wish us to add form element styling (using a bootstrap or similar for example) or if you wish the branding colours to be tweaked then we can do so - just ask the team.