Creating General Use Custom Pages

At Zenfolio, we’re happy to offer you the opportunity to build and use Custom Pages that may fulfill general needs of a photography website. Custom Pages are highly customizable down to the HTML level, and helpful in communicating specific messages to your clientele. 

Here are just a few examples of how Custom Pages can be used:

• Display Products and Prices

• ​Display Testimonials

• Display Specific Session Offerings and Details

• Add a booking widget to your Custom Page, with BookMe

Think of a Custom Page as a blank slate: the entire content area of the Custom Page is available for you to display information in whatever way you choose. 

You are free to create content through our built in Custom Page interface, or by manual coding the HTML into the content area of the page. Please note that while you do have the option to manually code your pages, the code itself cannot be supported through our customer support.

No matter how you choose to create content on a Custom Page, keep in mind that your website Header and Footer will operate there in the same way that they do elsewhere on your website.

Check out these guides for more information on some different things you might do within a Custom Page:

• Interested in more details on the Custom Page content interface? See the Formatting Toolbar article.

• Want more information on how to embed content into a Custom Page? See this link on embedding custom content. 

• Need additional help using Tables in Custom Pages? Check out this link on creating and editing Tables.

Create a Custom Page

1. In the Main Menu within your account, hover the mouse pointer over Website.

2. Then click on Custom Pages from the dropdown menu.

3. Click +New.

1. Enter the Title - Enter the name of your page into the Title field.

2. A Friendly URL will be generated in the URL field that can be used for linking from external websites.

3. Check/Uncheck Allow indexing by search engines -  If your content is useful to visitors and will help with Search Engine Optimization, we highly recommend leaving this checked.

4. Check or uncheck the box for Remove default page width. This allows the page to be wider than 944 pixels. Please note that removing the limit can drastically affect the layout of photos and text on the page.

5. Enter any desired text into the Content field. Use the tools in the formatting toolbar to control the format of the text. These tools can also be used to add Photos, Slideshows, Videos and embeddable HTML content.

6. Enter your META description in the text field. Your META Description is used by search engines to help catalogue your web page correctly. Adding a useful description or keywords will help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It is not seen by visitors on the page but it can be seen by visitors when viewing the page in a search result.

7. Click Save and Close to save your changes, or click Save and Preview to save and review your Custom Page.

You’ll find that you can control the design layout, placement of text, and other elements in a Custom Page effectively using a Table. 

First, simply create the Table. Then, edit the Table to include as many cells as you’d like. Finally, add a variety of media to each cell - text, photos, videos, embeddable slideshows, and other embeddable items all work great. Right-click on the table to customize its properties, like border size, header, caption, and more.

Though it may take a bit of experimentation to secure the design you’ve envisioned, using a Table is generally the easiest way to align and organize different items on a Custom Page. 

See this link for more details on using Tables in a Custom Page.
 

Formatting Text in the Custom Page

Want to change the look of your text? No problem. The formatting toolbar can be used to apply different fonts and font styles in your Custom Page.

A helpful note: if you’ve found that the font options in the Custom Page Formatting Toolbar are lacking, you may wish to utilize the fonts and font styles within the Theme section of your website instead.

Among other things, your website Theme controls the fonts and font styles applied to every page on your website, and there are actually many more font options within it than you’d find in the Formatting Toolbar for a Custom Page. Each Theme option we provide has pre-selected colors and fonts and font styles that we find appealing, but any of these can be changed at any time per your preference. Pro tip: You actually have the option to create your own custom Theme from scratch if you’d like to create a look and feel all your own.

So, the Custom Page Formatting Toolbar is a simpler way to make minor tweaks to your text, but the Themes section of your website is where some heavier editing can be done. Got it? Let’s take a deeper dive...

Within the Custom Page Formatting Toolbar, you can designate the format of the text, ie - Heading 1, Heading 2, Normal text, etc. Seen below.

With Theme editing, you can actually apply different fonts and font styles to the different formatted text options provided by the Formatting Toolbar (Heading 1, Heading 2, Normal text, etc). Seen below.


 

In other words, when a format is chosen via the Formatting Toolbar, the text displayed adopts the corresponding font and font styles within the Theme applied to the Custom Page. In the screenshots above, the Normal format was applied to the text and it will now use the font and font styles designated for the Normal Text element within the Theme.

Here are all of the Toolbar selectable formats and their corresponding elements within the Theme Designer. All elements listed can all be found under the Style tab.

Please note that if a font style is applied to the text using the Formatting Toolbar, the font style in the Theme will be overwritten (the Formatting Toolbar text will show instead). Similarly, if the text was pasted into the Custom Page content window with a font style already applied, the font style in the Theme won’t apply.

In short: the text must not have any formatting applied in order for the Theme font styles to apply. The Clear Format tool in the formatting toolbar can be used to easily remove any formatting introduced from cutting and pasting. 


Pro Tip: Copying text from another source (Microsoft Word, Google Docs, etc.) may carry over formatting rules that are present in those programs, but not recognized in the Zenfolio Custom Page content editor. For example, when you copy text from Google Docs and paste it into the Zenfolio Custom Page content editor, it will automatically be bold. 
You will need to remove the formatting from the text after it is pasted into the content area, and apply any text formatting from within Zenfolio. 


 

​Customize the Custom Page Presentation

Once your Custom Page has been created, it will still need to be customized. Like all the other pages in your website, Custom Pages will be customized from a selection of Themes and Options. 

1. In the Main Menu within your account, hover the mouse pointer over Website.

2. Then click on Custom Pages from the dropdown menu.

3. Click Customize next to the Custom page you want to customize.