From the course: Collaborating with Microsoft 365
Adding engaging content to your site
- [Instructor] When your whole team is using SharePoint the level of engagement is incredible, to further increase your team's engagement it's important that you know how to use some of the more advanced features of SharePoint. And this listen, I'm going to show you how to use sections and web parts to add more features within your SharePoint site. To get started, I'll open SharePoint. I've already created a communication site and named it skills conference page for an upcoming conference. Now I want to change the layout and look of the site and add some content. I want to start by changing the layout on this page. The layout of a SharePoint page is made up of different sections. Sections are distinct areas on the page and each component in a section is called a web part. Before I can make any changes, I need to go to the top right corner and select edit, on the left bar I can edit my sections. I simply click the plus and options open up, I can add, edit, move, duplicate, or delete a section from here. I want to remove one of my sections, so I'll scroll down to the section I'd like to remove, select it, and in the options on the far left, select delete. I can see the section has been deleted. Now I want to edit the web part in the section at the top of this page, this web part is a hero which allows you to display up to five items using text, images, and links. To edit this web part I'll select it and select edit web part, I can display my hero web part as tiles or layers. Selecting tiles displays my hero with images and links, selecting layers displays my hero with images, text, and links. I want to display text and images, so I'll keep layers selected from my layout options. One of the features that makes SharePoint so useful is you can easily edit when you need to add more content. Currently, my site has three layers. A layer contains an image, text, and a link. I only have a small amount of content that I want to share, so I only need one layer. So under layout, I will choose the one layer layout. Now that I've got the right layout, I can start to edit the image, text, and link for my web part. To edit the individual components of a web part, I need to go to edit web part details. I need to select the web part and find the edit details button, once selected an edit menu pops up with the edit options, right now I don't need to link anything, so I want to remove the link. I just need to go down to the options menu and expand it, for this web part the link is actually a part of a call to action, so to remove the link I'll just select no for show call to action link. When I'm ready to add a link I can move show call to action to yes, and add my link and call to action text when I'm ready. I want to change the text for this web part, so I'll edit the title and description to be specific to the skills conference. I see that my new title and description have been added, now I want to change the image that's displayed on this web part. I'll expand the background image section and select change. I don't have images of my own to use, so I'll select stock images. I'll search for conference in the search bar and select a photo I like, once I've selected the image, I'll see the image on my page. Under the image in the background section I will add alternative texts to make my site accessible for those who can't see it, the changes I've made look great. I want to add one more thing to my page before I finish, a countdown timer to get the team excited about the upcoming skills conference. I'll close this web part for now. Before I add the countdown timer, I want to clean up my page a bit. I want to select showcase a variety of images and remove that web part. Now I want to add a new web part and I'll add a countdown timer. You can change the title and description directly from this web part by selecting them, I'll change the title to skills conference and change the description to countdown to fun. You can also change the date and time for your countdown or even add a call to action link or a background image, lots of options to customize the look of this countdown timer. Looks great to me, so I'll close my editing window. I like this look, it's a great landing page and I know I can come back and easily add or edit more content. I'll select republish to make sure that when I share my site, everyone else can see the updated version. Now you can make engaging sites using sections and web parts. Give it a try.