What is Community Designer?

New Age of Communities

Costs on collaboration tools are forecasted to grow to $3.5 billion from 2013-2018 according to IDC; crafting the gigantic market for communities. More than 2,000 active communities of leading global organizations like British Sky Broadcasting, GE Capital, Honeywell, Key Bank, Pearson, State of Colorado, Tata Communications, are based on the Salesforce Community Cloud platform. The Community Designer (Beta) fills the gap by providing a tool to create visually appealing skins for Salesforce Communities.

What exactly is Salesforce1 Community Designer (Beta)?

Communities can now be created quicker than ever with Community Designer. You can create, brand, and publish a custom community that works seamlessly on any device. You can start your self-service community by choosing from four modern design templates that are available, and also manage the styling to match your corporate branding.

Customizing the Template with Community Designer

You can update your community according to your company’s branding and fonts once you have chosen the template by following these steps:

• Click on the links and menu items available to navigate the view that you want to style.
• Upload your branding images, and change fonts and colours to match. You can see the changes immediately as they appear on the page.
• You can now use the toolbar to see how your community appears on different devices, check the views that are difficult to navigate such as error and login views, and finally preview and publish the community.
• Now go to the Site.com Studio to make advanced customizations to your community pages. Access Community Management to manage topics, reputation, community analytics and moderation.
• Finally, go to Community Setup to customize community membership, login, and other settings.

Benefits of Community Designer

Apart from Site.com and Force.com, Community Designer is the third tool to customize and brand your Salesforce Community. The key benefits of using it are:

• Community Designer templates provide a proven engagement framework
• You can apply your branding without writing CSS
• Even non-technical community managers can easily customize the community
• Community designer accommodates company branding with a consistent customized appearance (like fonts and colours) across all the corporate marketing properties in the community
• The templates are directed for self-service: case deflection, case submission, knowledgebase, etc.

Limitations of Community Designer

Salesforce.com is launching the Community Designer as part of their winter’15 release and since the product is in Beta right now, there are some limitations that you should be aware of:

• Community Designer does not support branding for sites that have not been created by using one of the four templates
• You can only brand the site’s default home page
• The template builder is hardcoded for Cases and Knowledgebase for now. Adding other tabs requires custom coding
• Embedded fonts are not supported
• Few possibilities for SEO optimization like tags, keywords, search engine friendly urls, etc.
• The template builder misses the custom apex widget creation which can override the out of the box business logic

We expect some of these limitations to go away in the near future. Even with these limitations the Community Designer is an excellent tool for styling your Knowledgebase and Cases pages for the newbie and your entire community for the expert.

About Grazitti’s Community Services

At Grazitti^™, we have an expertise in multiple community platforms, community planning, building, executing and managing to set up robust communities from scratch. We offer creative, customized and strategically rich Quick Start Community^™ Packages, overcoming all the limitations, with added features like:

• Engaging Responsive & Brand-Centric Design
• Full Text Search
• Gamification
• Rich User Profiles Custom Salesforce Objects
• Custom Dashboard & Reporting, and much more!

We have built communities for Marketo, Optimizely, Alteryx, Ping Identity, and more. To know more about building your business community, Contact Us Now!