When you design layouts, you create the design settings that play a crucial role in the success of your entire website. Layouts determine the appearance of multiple pages on your site, and they must be in place before you can create individual web pages.
Before you create a layout, you must have at least one style sheet available. The style sheets you associate with a layout allows you to edit the appearance of elements such as fonts and colours. Style sheets also affect the appearance of the content on the web pages and templates that you associate with the layout. For information about style sheets, see Style Sheets.
On your layouts, you include images, links, and other items to display throughout your site. These design elements provide the backdrop for all web pages and templates associated with a particular layout. In addition, you include content placeholder panes in layouts to define where to place content on templates and web pages. After you associate a page or template with a layout, you can insert parts in these panes and display content on your website.
For example, you can create a layout with your logo at the top, your mission statement at the bottom, background colours that match your branding, and content placeholder panes throughout. When you create a template based on the layout, the template inherits the logo, mission statement, and background colours, and you can insert parts in the panes. When you create pages based on such a template, the pages inherit the logo, mission statement, colours from the layout, as well as any content from the template. In the remaining content placeholder panes, you can insert parts to display content that is particular to the web page.
Warning: We strongly recommend that you limit full supervisor rights for Layouts to a select group of users. General users should not access layouts. Any change can affect multiple web pages. We recommend that only users knowledgeable in all areas of website design and the program perform tasks in Layouts.