Let’s take a tour of the elements that make up your Chorus homepage.
Homepages offer opportunities for brand expression, engagement, and highlighting your best work. And while third-party platforms might have stolen a bit of the homepage’s shine (and traffic) in recent years, it’s still a key destination for your most loyal readers.
That’s why we build beautiful, customizable homepages that are designed to work across screen sizes and device types.
Homepages will work as described in this guide.
Your organization has the ability to customize the function and appearance of the home page. Editors will have the ability to use built-in Chorus tools such as the Hub Layout to do things like curate the stories that appear on the homepage.
Header and navigation
Your header showcases your network or community branding with an optional background image, date, or tagline.
Headers work in concert with site navigation, which tells readers what you’re all about and helps them find content that interests them.
Site navigation can include links to your community or network social profiles, a newsletter subscription prompt, and site search (on desktop). If your network allows audience members to create accounts, they can log in from the navigation, too.
You can update the links, background image, and tagline in your navigation if you have editor permissions or higher.
Hero
The hero is the first content area on your homepage, featuring between one and 10 stories. Stories in the hero have a larger visual impact than those that follow it. On mobile, the first story is usually given the most prominence.
Most networks have several hero options available, allowing for flexible homepage presentations. For example, you might use a five-up hero day-to-day, but switch to a one-up if you want to highlight a major project.
You can change your hero option, or rearrange stories within the hero, using the layout tool. Hubpages have similar layout options.
Breakers
Breakers allow you to highlight a certain type of content, such as podcasts, videos, or stories belonging to a certain group. They typically stretch across the full width of the page, “breaking” up your list of latest stories.
Typically, beakers are powered by a group or hub, and will display content in the order it appears on the group page. To request other changes to a breaker, contact us.
Homepage feed
The homepage feed is where most of your latest stories appear. Stories flow in reverse-chronological order by default—and audiences tend to expect the latest stories to appear at the top of the feed—but you can also rearrange and pin stories using the layout tool.
By default, feature stories will display larger in the feed. If you’d prefer to highlight stories from a particular group, contact us to set that up. You can also place groups or stories from another Chorus site in the feed. To see past stories, audiences can select the more stories link that points to your archive.
Sidebars
Sidebars can be added to a homepage to display additional content from a group or calls to action. Group images and cover images can display in sidebars. Most sidebars will not display on mobile, but some elements like newsletter subscription prompts can be prioritized to always display. Contact us for any changes to sidebars.
Footer
Finally, at the end of your homepage (and nearly every page) the footer will appear. Links in the footer point to featured groups or pages, along with legal information, contact options, and our status page.