Hi everyone, it's Matt from Collaboration Coach.
This time i'm going to share some tips to make your SharePoint pages look great
and I'm going to focus this time on news posts.
I've noticed that most news website posts
tend to have one column on the left for text and images
and they'll often have a column on the right that lets the reader know
about other stories on their site.
We can do that in SharePoint too,
and so in this video,
I'm going to create a panel on the right hand side of my news post
that promotes the most viewed news and events in my site.
I just wanted to say that this video is taken from a class
that we just posted to our Collaboration School.
Our Collaboration School has classes on Microsoft 365 apps like Teams and SharePoint
and we have on-demand video lessons, quizzes and how-to guides
to help you master Microsoft 365.
Okay so let's get started with the lesson.
I'm going to share some tips for taking your news creation skills to the next level.
We're going to look at where my posts are saved and how I can find them,
and then I'm going to add a "most viewed" panel to my post
which will display the most viewed news and events on my site.
This will make it look more professional
and draw viewers attention to other stories and events that they will surely be interested in.
And then we'll save that post as a template
so it can be used again by other editors, making the news creation workflow that much slicker.
First of all, where are my posts saved and how do I find them?
Well, posts live in the site pages library of any SharePoint site.
To get there I can go to the settings wheel,
and then I choose "site contents",
and then "site pages".
And now I can see all the posts for that site.
They are grouped by who created them
and I can find my post by title,
or to make it easier I can filter the list by the "modified by" column,
and then I can choose "@me" in the panel over here,
and that will show me all the posts that I modified.
And when I've found my post, which is called "our commitments", I can open it.
Now I'm going to edit the post
and I'm going to add the "most viewed" panel,
and to do that, I need to add another column.
So I click into the section
and from the toolbar on the left hand rail I choose "edit section".
This section panel opens on the right and I'll choose the "one third right" panel.
This will give me the large column for the text on the left,
and a thinner column on the right.
Now in the new column I'll choose the plus button and add a web part.
I want to add the highlighted content web part so I'll type "high" into the search box and select it.
The web part is added but it needs some configuration.
In the panel, the first thing I need to do is change the type.
It's set to "documents", but I want it to show me news.
I just drop the type menu down and choose "news".
You can see the content of the web part has changed.
It's now showing me a list of news. So far so good.
Now I'm going to add the events, and I'll choose the "add content type" link from the panel,
and then I'll drop the menu down and choose the event type.
The layout options are fine and I'll keep it with "show title enabled"
and also the grid layout.
And at the bottom here I can also choose...
...to hide the web part if there's no news or events to show.
And if I save that draft you can now see the panel on the right looking good.
Remember this video is taken from a class in our Collaboration School
so if you like it, check out the school by hitting the link in the top right corner now
or find it in the description.
Now I've done all this cool formatting,
I want the rest of my team to be able to use it,
then they don't have to start all over again from scratch
and all our news posts will look awesome.
So my last tip is how to save posts as templates.
When I'm editing I can see this drop down next to the "save as draft" button,
and that is "save as template".
When I choose that, I see a green banner across the top of the post
that says "this is a page template saved on your site".
It then asks me to name the template
and I'm going to call mine "news post".
Then I choose "save as template".
Now if I go back to my home page,
and choose "new",
and then "news post",
in the template section on the left I can see my new "news post" template,
and if I click on it I can see all the formatting and the content I added...
...in the preview over there.
Now currently, as you just saw, the default template is "blank",
and that just means that it's selected whenever you create a new page.
Now if I choose the ellipsis on my own news post template, I can set that as the default.
So that's just another way to make it easier for your news creators
to find the right template.
So I choose my template and then I create the post
and now I have a new page that I can make my own, but all the formatting is done for me
making the whole editing process that much quicker.
So that's how you add a "most viewed item" section to your news post.
Thank you so much for watching,
and I'll see you next time.