In this tour, you’ll get a detailed look at page settings, block settings and how to create a page framework to get the page looking just right.
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Check out this article to learn about merge fields, this article to learn about navigation for pages, and this article to learn about adding a search bar.
Feature updates: We've expanded how merge fields can be applied since this video was produced. We've also added the ability to include navigation for pages and a search bar.
Check out this article to learn about merge fields, this article to learn about navigation for pages, and this article to learn about adding a search bar.
Home > Ontraport for marketing > Pages > Ontraport Pages: The grand tour
Ontraport Pages: The grand tour
Course Instructor
- How to use the toolbar to edit font styles, colors, and page width
- How to turn on split testing to find what converts best
- Where to find SEO and social settings
- How to add your branding to browser tabs
- How to change who can see your page or a particular block
- How to stylize the size, border, spacing and shadow of your block
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Transcript
Welcome to the Ontraport Pages grand tour! In this video, I’ll go over page settings and block settings. You’ll learn how to create a page framework, and edit the page and block settings so your page is just how you want it.
Let’s jump in!
Let’s start at the very top bar. You’ll see here your page’s name goes right at the top. Design is where you go to build your pages and access your element palette and page’s canvas.
Over here, Stats shows you your page’s key performance indicators like visits and conversions. If you’ve turned on split testing on your page, you can also check out the visits and conversions of every version of your page in one place.
Cancel and Save is where you can save your work without publishing your changes. You can continue perfecting your page until it’s just right and save your work as you go. If you cancel, any changes made since the last save will be discarded.
When you’re ready to make your page go live, click publish. You’ll choose the URL you want to publish your page to — you can learn more on that in the Publishing Your Pages video. Every time you publish your page, your newest version will be added to your version history, and you can revert back to it at any time.
Now let’s take a look at the top toolbar. Here you can set font styles as you build. And you can tweak and change all the places where that style is used with one simple move. So it’s a breeze to update if you change your mind down the road. Setting font styles is a good practice for keeping pages looking clean. Too many fonts makes a page look messy. We don’t want you looking like an amateur!
For example, let’s say you have 5 field labels or subheadlines, and you decide you want to switch up the font or bold ‘em up a little. You can do that all at once by changing the font style instead of editing each element.
Colors work just like fonts. You can choose the five colors you want to use on your page and decide if you want to use them to color backgrounds or elements. When you change the color here, it will change all the places where that color is used.
So, imagine that you realize that your brand’s color is slightly off, but it’s used all over your page. You can just swap your color for the right hex code and have every element update automatically.
Let’s look at page width next. Many people have giant screens, and letting your content spread across the whole screen can look sloppy. In page width, you can add gutters to either side to keep your content neat even on large screens. Here’s expedia.com as an example of a page that does this.
This setting squeezes in the blocks that live on the page. Because the blocks sit on top of the page, the page background is exposed, which I’ll show you in a minute. A full-width page will never show any page background, because the blocks cover it, edge to edge.
We recommend that beginning designers select the ‘large’ option, though it’s really up to you. Whatever you choose, pick a size and use the same setting for all pages on your site. Changing page width between pages is jarring and makes users feel a little nutty.
You’ll also want to check out the view size tool to make sure your design looks good on desktops and mobile devices. We go into more depth on this in the video Designing for Mobile Screens.
Now let’s look at version history. Marketers like to tinker with their pages to improve conversions over time. But sometimes your changes have the opposite effect! With version history, you can revert your page back to your most recent version if your newest version isn’t converting well.
If you love building pages in Ontraport, you might want to share them with other users — so here’s where you can do that. You can share your pages in two different ways: to all users with Ontraport’s marketplace or directly with individual users. You can choose to share your content for free, or you can charge a fee for it. You can learn more about this process in our video on Sharing Pages.
Split testing is a way of running an experiment to compare versions of a page to see which one performs better. When you turn on split testing on your pages and publish, Ontraport will automatically show different page visitors different versions of your page. And it’ll evenly distribute the traffic among your versions.
We recommend that you change just one element of your page — the headline, an image, the call-to-action button, etc. If you do this, you can figure out the reason one page “wins” over another. If you change too many variables at once, this won’t be clear.
Note that a “conversion” here is counted when someone fills out a form. So if your page doesn’t have a form on it, this tool isn’t the one to use for optimizing the page. If it does have a form, give it a go… You’ll see after a few days or weeks which page performs better, and you can turn off the loser and try something else!
In the page settings tab, you’ll find a few more important settings. Here you can set your page’s background to a color, gradient, transparent or add an image to your background to create the page design you want.
This is the background for the whole page and what you put in your blocks will cover it. If your blocks have backgrounds and are full-width, your page background will be completely covered and hidden. If your blocks aren’t full width, you’ll see the background on the sides of each block.
In SEO & social settings, you can set important SEO tags such as title and meta description directly in your page builder. Pick the image that you want to appear when you share links to your page on social media, to make sure your posts look the way you want. To keep your title tag from getting cut off, keep your title under 60 characters.
Favicon allows you to add your branding to the tabs on your visitor’s browsers. This is an easy way to make sure your pages are always identifiable and your branding is everywhere. Your favicon must be a 16px by 16px .ico file. You can create a favicon using any of the free generators that you’ll find by googling ‘favicon generator’.
With custom code, you can add custom code to your pages, and you can choose to add it to your page’s header, body and footer. For example, you might want to add Google Analytics or Facebook tracking scripts on your Ontraport pages.
We recommend that you only add scripts you really need to the page, because third party pixels and scripts can slow down the loading of your page, and nobody wants that.
Using display settings, you can choose who can see your page. You can protect pages behind a login to make a membership site here or create a page just for new visitors or for contacts already in your database. Plus you can choose where to send visitors to, who don’t meet your conditions. Display settings help you create complete password protected membership sites, which we’ll dive into in a separate series of videos.
With Ontraform settings you can create a pop up that appears based on your visitor’s actions, such as time on page or how far they scroll. So, you can pop a lightbox with a special offer or opt-in form when your visitor has scrolled down a certain percentage of your page. That way, you can still grab attention but not annoy your visitors with pop ups as soon as they land on your site.
Another great way to use pop ups is to only show your lightbox after your visitors have been on your page for a certain amount of time. Exit intent pop ups are a great way to make a final effort to collect your visitors data by popping a form when they’re about to leave. This works best if you have a good incentive for your visitors to sign up. Learn more about these settings in the video on Ontraforms.
In block layout mode, you can make adjustments to a number of block settings. As you learned in an earlier video, a page is composed of individual blocks and each block has its own layout and settings. Let’s dive into a single block by clicking the gear icon on the right. This shows you all sorts of additional settings and features.
In block settings, you can add a block name. Name your blocks so you can find and easily distinguish between them if you ever want to use them again on another page or reference them in a link, for example.
You can create more advanced designs when you set backgrounds for specific blocks. You can choose from transparent, colors, image and video. If you select colors you can create a gradient.
So, if your page has an image as its background, you can set your block’s background to transparent so you can see the page background. Or if you want your block to stand out, you can add a color background to it.
Fine tune your block layout using your spacing settings: margins and padding. Margins are the space around an element. They are on the outside of your rows, columns, blocks and elements. Since your blocks are stacked on top of each other, you can add margins to the top and bottom to push other blocks away.
Padding is the space between a container and the content inside of it. Padding adds space inside of your blocks. You can add padding to the top, bottom, left and right to shift where your content sits inside of your block. Here’s where that might come in handy:
You’ve created the perfect layout on your page using columns and rows to put your elements exactly where you want them. But let’s say you just want a little bit more space in between your block and the next block on the page. Push your margin slider until you have enough space, like this.
It’s a good idea not to add huge margins and padding to make your blocks look the way you want. If you need to add big chunks of space, add additional columns or rows. This’ll make your page far more responsive to multiple screen sizes, and you’ll spend less time formatting your pages to make them look the way you want.
Your block’s size settings let you choose how tall or wide you want your block to be.
To choose your block content’s maximum width:
Choose “Default” if you want there to be margins on the sides of your block. Choose “Full” if you want your block to extend to the sides of the screen.
To adjust your block’s height:
Choose “Default” if you want your block’s height to match the size of the elements you put in it.
Choose “Match viewport” to make your block as tall as the screen it’s viewed on. This is kind of a cool effect, and worth trying out to see how you like it.
You can also stylize your block using border, arrow & shadow. Adding a border or shadow to it makes your block stand out. You’ve also got settings that control exactly how your border or shadow will appear. Here’s an example of when you might use these settings. Let’s say you want to highlight your product benefits section of your page and make sure that it sticks out -- add a drop shadow so the most important information on your page really grabs people.
Now let’s look at the sticky block settings. If you have a really important block on your page, you can make sure that your visitors can always see it by making your block “stick” to the top of your page. For example, you can make the opt-in form on your page sticky, so any time your visitors are on your page, it’s easy for them to opt in.
Your display settings are a way to customize who can see this particular block, and when. There are 3 settings to choose from, and you can use them in combination with each other.
In device display, you can choose which devices your block should be visible on. If you find that one of your blocks looks great on a desktop screen but is too complicated on mobile, no problem. You can create a desktop-only version and a mobile-only version of your block, so it’ll look great from any device.
Delayed display allows you to choose when you want your block to appear on your page. Show your block immediately, or have your block magically appear after a set amount of time. This is a great way to include offers on your page without overwhelming your visitor. Instead of showing your opt-in offer the second your visitor lands, you can wait a few seconds. Then show your offer to someone you think isn’t going to immediately bounce from your page.
Using conditional display, you can choose exactly who you want your block to be visible to based on what you know about them or what they’ve done in the past. This is an awesome way to create special offers. You could create offers for brand new leads, to people who already opted in, or even just to people who have purchased from you before.
So you might use it to, say, create a “new signup” offer just for new leads. You would set your block’s display settings to “Anonymous visitors only.” That way you can add a lead capture form to your page, and only show it to people who haven't opted in yet!
Or you can show an upsell offer to visitors who purchased a specific product. For example, if you sold an expensive pair of leather shoes to a customer, you can show them your shoe shine kit to maintain them. We’ll do a deep dive into Conditional Block settings in our video on Personalizing With Conditional Display Blocks.
We’ve covered pages and page settings, and then we drilled in to look at a single block and the settings for a block. Now we’re going to drill in one level deeper, to a single column in a block. We can get even more specific with our settings and create some really cool designs.
When you hover over a column when you’re editing a block, you can click the settings icon to see the settings for specific columns. You have three settings that are available for blocks: background, spacing, and border, arrow & shadow. And your settings work in exactly the same way as they do for blocks.
You can set your column’s background to a specific color or image or make it transparent so you can totally control your page’s design. Use the spacing to add padding, margins and set the alignment of the content in the specific column you’re editing. Border, arrow & shadow settings help you make specific columns stand out from the rest of your block. With these settings, you can make things look like individual cards, for example, or any number of other cool design styles. Pretty rad!
Wow, we’ve covered a lot in this Ontraport Pages Grand Tour! Now you know about the page-level and block settings. Congrats! In future videos we’ll talk about all of the elements you can add to your pages.
Let’s jump in!
Let’s start at the very top bar. You’ll see here your page’s name goes right at the top. Design is where you go to build your pages and access your element palette and page’s canvas.
Over here, Stats shows you your page’s key performance indicators like visits and conversions. If you’ve turned on split testing on your page, you can also check out the visits and conversions of every version of your page in one place.
Cancel and Save is where you can save your work without publishing your changes. You can continue perfecting your page until it’s just right and save your work as you go. If you cancel, any changes made since the last save will be discarded.
When you’re ready to make your page go live, click publish. You’ll choose the URL you want to publish your page to — you can learn more on that in the Publishing Your Pages video. Every time you publish your page, your newest version will be added to your version history, and you can revert back to it at any time.
Now let’s take a look at the top toolbar. Here you can set font styles as you build. And you can tweak and change all the places where that style is used with one simple move. So it’s a breeze to update if you change your mind down the road. Setting font styles is a good practice for keeping pages looking clean. Too many fonts makes a page look messy. We don’t want you looking like an amateur!
For example, let’s say you have 5 field labels or subheadlines, and you decide you want to switch up the font or bold ‘em up a little. You can do that all at once by changing the font style instead of editing each element.
Colors work just like fonts. You can choose the five colors you want to use on your page and decide if you want to use them to color backgrounds or elements. When you change the color here, it will change all the places where that color is used.
So, imagine that you realize that your brand’s color is slightly off, but it’s used all over your page. You can just swap your color for the right hex code and have every element update automatically.
Let’s look at page width next. Many people have giant screens, and letting your content spread across the whole screen can look sloppy. In page width, you can add gutters to either side to keep your content neat even on large screens. Here’s expedia.com as an example of a page that does this.
This setting squeezes in the blocks that live on the page. Because the blocks sit on top of the page, the page background is exposed, which I’ll show you in a minute. A full-width page will never show any page background, because the blocks cover it, edge to edge.
We recommend that beginning designers select the ‘large’ option, though it’s really up to you. Whatever you choose, pick a size and use the same setting for all pages on your site. Changing page width between pages is jarring and makes users feel a little nutty.
You’ll also want to check out the view size tool to make sure your design looks good on desktops and mobile devices. We go into more depth on this in the video Designing for Mobile Screens.
Now let’s look at version history. Marketers like to tinker with their pages to improve conversions over time. But sometimes your changes have the opposite effect! With version history, you can revert your page back to your most recent version if your newest version isn’t converting well.
If you love building pages in Ontraport, you might want to share them with other users — so here’s where you can do that. You can share your pages in two different ways: to all users with Ontraport’s marketplace or directly with individual users. You can choose to share your content for free, or you can charge a fee for it. You can learn more about this process in our video on Sharing Pages.
Split testing is a way of running an experiment to compare versions of a page to see which one performs better. When you turn on split testing on your pages and publish, Ontraport will automatically show different page visitors different versions of your page. And it’ll evenly distribute the traffic among your versions.
We recommend that you change just one element of your page — the headline, an image, the call-to-action button, etc. If you do this, you can figure out the reason one page “wins” over another. If you change too many variables at once, this won’t be clear.
Note that a “conversion” here is counted when someone fills out a form. So if your page doesn’t have a form on it, this tool isn’t the one to use for optimizing the page. If it does have a form, give it a go… You’ll see after a few days or weeks which page performs better, and you can turn off the loser and try something else!
In the page settings tab, you’ll find a few more important settings. Here you can set your page’s background to a color, gradient, transparent or add an image to your background to create the page design you want.
This is the background for the whole page and what you put in your blocks will cover it. If your blocks have backgrounds and are full-width, your page background will be completely covered and hidden. If your blocks aren’t full width, you’ll see the background on the sides of each block.
In SEO & social settings, you can set important SEO tags such as title and meta description directly in your page builder. Pick the image that you want to appear when you share links to your page on social media, to make sure your posts look the way you want. To keep your title tag from getting cut off, keep your title under 60 characters.
Favicon allows you to add your branding to the tabs on your visitor’s browsers. This is an easy way to make sure your pages are always identifiable and your branding is everywhere. Your favicon must be a 16px by 16px .ico file. You can create a favicon using any of the free generators that you’ll find by googling ‘favicon generator’.
With custom code, you can add custom code to your pages, and you can choose to add it to your page’s header, body and footer. For example, you might want to add Google Analytics or Facebook tracking scripts on your Ontraport pages.
We recommend that you only add scripts you really need to the page, because third party pixels and scripts can slow down the loading of your page, and nobody wants that.
Using display settings, you can choose who can see your page. You can protect pages behind a login to make a membership site here or create a page just for new visitors or for contacts already in your database. Plus you can choose where to send visitors to, who don’t meet your conditions. Display settings help you create complete password protected membership sites, which we’ll dive into in a separate series of videos.
With Ontraform settings you can create a pop up that appears based on your visitor’s actions, such as time on page or how far they scroll. So, you can pop a lightbox with a special offer or opt-in form when your visitor has scrolled down a certain percentage of your page. That way, you can still grab attention but not annoy your visitors with pop ups as soon as they land on your site.
Another great way to use pop ups is to only show your lightbox after your visitors have been on your page for a certain amount of time. Exit intent pop ups are a great way to make a final effort to collect your visitors data by popping a form when they’re about to leave. This works best if you have a good incentive for your visitors to sign up. Learn more about these settings in the video on Ontraforms.
In block layout mode, you can make adjustments to a number of block settings. As you learned in an earlier video, a page is composed of individual blocks and each block has its own layout and settings. Let’s dive into a single block by clicking the gear icon on the right. This shows you all sorts of additional settings and features.
In block settings, you can add a block name. Name your blocks so you can find and easily distinguish between them if you ever want to use them again on another page or reference them in a link, for example.
You can create more advanced designs when you set backgrounds for specific blocks. You can choose from transparent, colors, image and video. If you select colors you can create a gradient.
So, if your page has an image as its background, you can set your block’s background to transparent so you can see the page background. Or if you want your block to stand out, you can add a color background to it.
Fine tune your block layout using your spacing settings: margins and padding. Margins are the space around an element. They are on the outside of your rows, columns, blocks and elements. Since your blocks are stacked on top of each other, you can add margins to the top and bottom to push other blocks away.
Padding is the space between a container and the content inside of it. Padding adds space inside of your blocks. You can add padding to the top, bottom, left and right to shift where your content sits inside of your block. Here’s where that might come in handy:
You’ve created the perfect layout on your page using columns and rows to put your elements exactly where you want them. But let’s say you just want a little bit more space in between your block and the next block on the page. Push your margin slider until you have enough space, like this.
It’s a good idea not to add huge margins and padding to make your blocks look the way you want. If you need to add big chunks of space, add additional columns or rows. This’ll make your page far more responsive to multiple screen sizes, and you’ll spend less time formatting your pages to make them look the way you want.
Your block’s size settings let you choose how tall or wide you want your block to be.
To choose your block content’s maximum width:
Choose “Default” if you want there to be margins on the sides of your block. Choose “Full” if you want your block to extend to the sides of the screen.
To adjust your block’s height:
Choose “Default” if you want your block’s height to match the size of the elements you put in it.
Choose “Match viewport” to make your block as tall as the screen it’s viewed on. This is kind of a cool effect, and worth trying out to see how you like it.
You can also stylize your block using border, arrow & shadow. Adding a border or shadow to it makes your block stand out. You’ve also got settings that control exactly how your border or shadow will appear. Here’s an example of when you might use these settings. Let’s say you want to highlight your product benefits section of your page and make sure that it sticks out -- add a drop shadow so the most important information on your page really grabs people.
Now let’s look at the sticky block settings. If you have a really important block on your page, you can make sure that your visitors can always see it by making your block “stick” to the top of your page. For example, you can make the opt-in form on your page sticky, so any time your visitors are on your page, it’s easy for them to opt in.
Your display settings are a way to customize who can see this particular block, and when. There are 3 settings to choose from, and you can use them in combination with each other.
In device display, you can choose which devices your block should be visible on. If you find that one of your blocks looks great on a desktop screen but is too complicated on mobile, no problem. You can create a desktop-only version and a mobile-only version of your block, so it’ll look great from any device.
Delayed display allows you to choose when you want your block to appear on your page. Show your block immediately, or have your block magically appear after a set amount of time. This is a great way to include offers on your page without overwhelming your visitor. Instead of showing your opt-in offer the second your visitor lands, you can wait a few seconds. Then show your offer to someone you think isn’t going to immediately bounce from your page.
Using conditional display, you can choose exactly who you want your block to be visible to based on what you know about them or what they’ve done in the past. This is an awesome way to create special offers. You could create offers for brand new leads, to people who already opted in, or even just to people who have purchased from you before.
So you might use it to, say, create a “new signup” offer just for new leads. You would set your block’s display settings to “Anonymous visitors only.” That way you can add a lead capture form to your page, and only show it to people who haven't opted in yet!
Or you can show an upsell offer to visitors who purchased a specific product. For example, if you sold an expensive pair of leather shoes to a customer, you can show them your shoe shine kit to maintain them. We’ll do a deep dive into Conditional Block settings in our video on Personalizing With Conditional Display Blocks.
We’ve covered pages and page settings, and then we drilled in to look at a single block and the settings for a block. Now we’re going to drill in one level deeper, to a single column in a block. We can get even more specific with our settings and create some really cool designs.
When you hover over a column when you’re editing a block, you can click the settings icon to see the settings for specific columns. You have three settings that are available for blocks: background, spacing, and border, arrow & shadow. And your settings work in exactly the same way as they do for blocks.
You can set your column’s background to a specific color or image or make it transparent so you can totally control your page’s design. Use the spacing to add padding, margins and set the alignment of the content in the specific column you’re editing. Border, arrow & shadow settings help you make specific columns stand out from the rest of your block. With these settings, you can make things look like individual cards, for example, or any number of other cool design styles. Pretty rad!
Wow, we’ve covered a lot in this Ontraport Pages Grand Tour! Now you know about the page-level and block settings. Congrats! In future videos we’ll talk about all of the elements you can add to your pages.
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