Step 3: Personalize and customize your site

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Now that you’ve added some content, you can get started making your site your own, both visually and functionally.

Customizing your site name and slogan

Who are you? What are you about? Your site name and slogan are the first things a lot of people will see on your site. Perhaps even more importantly, search engines pay attention to them, too.

1. Hover over your site name. You will see a gear symbol pop out near it. This is the gateway to the "contextual menu" of your page elements. It gives you quick access to various functionality, depending on what you are hovering over: edit, delete, configure, and so on.

   

2. Hover over the gear symbol. Click the Configure block link that appears.

   

3. On the block configuration page, enter your site's name. Skip the other options on the block configuration page for now, and click Save block. The next section below, "Contact form", covers block configuration in detail.

4. Follow the same steps for your site's slogan.

   

Take it further: There is an administration page that controls your site name, slogan, and a few more things. Go to the Site information page on your site at Configuration > Site information, where you can set your site's email sender address, get creative with error pages, and even change which page is the front page of your site. For more information, see Site information.

Adding a contact form

Let your visitors get in touch with you without having to reveal your e-mail address.

If you didn't select the "Contact us" feature when you made your site, you'll have to enable the Contact module. What are modules? They add new functionality to your site. For more information, see "Modules" in the Drupal jargon primer.

Specify permissions

1. Ensure that the Contact module is enabled.

   For more information about enabling modules, see Using features and modules.

2. Go to Structure > Contact form.
3. Click the Add category link to create a new category or click the Edit link of an existing contact category. For each category you can set the following options:
   • Category - The category is displayed to visitors sending you messages.
   • Recipients - Each contact category can send messages to one or more different people: your sales team, technical support, etc.
   • Auto-reply - Optionally define an auto-reply message.
   • Weight - This determines how categories are sorted. Larger weights "sink" below smaller ones.
   • Selected - Set the default contact category.
4. Drupal allows you to control what your users can see or do based on user roles and permissions. If you want all site visitors to be able to contact you, go to the Permissions page at People > Permissions > Permissions and make sure that the checkboxes under "Anonymous user" and "Authenticated user" are selected for the permission "Use the site-wide contact form".

   

   For more information about site access, see Site membership and access quick start and User roles and permissions.

Take it further: Add custom text to your contact page. Since the contact page is a form and not content, you'll need to add a block to it if you want to add custom text to your contact page.

In Drupal, blocks are special containers for information that you can create and place on any part of any page on your site. For more on blocks, see "Blocks" in the Drupal jargon primer and Blocks.

Adding custom text to your contact page

1. Go to the Blocks page at Structure > Blocks, and then click the Add block link.

   

2. In the Block description field, identify the block in the administrative interface.

3. Fill in the Block title and Block body fields.



4. Specify the location of the block by selecting the Region. This controls where on the page the block will appear. For more information on page regions, see "Regions" in the Drupal jargon primer and Blocks.

   

5. Specify the Visibility settings. This controls on which pages the block will appear. The block in this example is set to appear only on the Contact page.

   

6. To edit the block later, you can either use its gear symbol and contextual menu link on the Contact page or click its Edit link on the Blocks page.

Here is the newly customized Contact page!

Applying a theme

Now that your site is starting to work like you want it to, it's time to consider how it should look. The look and feel of a Drupal site is called a "theme". Drupal Gardens includes a powerful, easy to use, in-browser themeing tool called the ThemeBuilder.

Use the ThemeBuilder to change your theme

1. To open the Drupal Gardens ThemeBuilder, go to your site's front page and click Appearance in the toolbar. This takes you to the Themes tab of the ThemeBuilder.

   

2. Click on various themes to try them out in your site.

   This base theme is called "Carbon":

   

   If you want a blank canvas to work on, use the "Bare bones" theme:

   

3. Choose the one that is closest to how you want your site to look, and then click Save. You'll be asked to give it a name. The theme will appear on the "My themes" sub-tab, and you can continue working on your masterpiece!

4. When your theme is ready for prime-time, click Publish.

Add your site logo and favicon

1. Go to Brand > Logo in the ThemeBuilder and add your site logo and favicon.

   

2. Don't forget to save your theme!

Take it further: The Drupal Gardens ThemeBuilder is capable of much more: complete control of borders, padding and margins, background colors and images, and page layout. You can even enter custom CSS into the Advanced tab. For in-depth information about themeing your Drupal Gardens site and the ThemeBuilder, go to Appearance.

Continue to Step 4: Manage your content >