Website Builder Guide

If you've already reviewed the Starter guide, it's now time to dive a little deeper into the site building process. In an effort to help your project go smoother, here are commonly asked questions and tips that can hopefully help streamline the website creation process within Blackbaud's school website solution.

If Blackbaud K-12 hosts your DNS, any required changes with the DNS in order to launch the site will be handled by us. However, you will still need to make internal DNS changes to ensure that your site is available to others within your network.

The main change you will need to handle on launch day is to point your subdomain on you internal DNS servers at a CNAME record in this format: schoolname.cms.bbedusites.com.

Note: The internal root domain IP does not need to be changed if it is used for active directory.

Warning: Do not add 54.209.77.18 or any IP address to the www record, as your site will go down.

For schools that are hosted by a third party, you'll need to perform the following changes:

  1. Two days before launch, reduce the TTL setting (Time to Live) to five minutes or the lowest possible setting.

  2. Point your root domain on your external DNS servers to 54.209.77.18.

  3. Point your subdomain on your external DNS servers at CNAME record in this format: schoolname.cms.bbedusites.com

    After the site is live on launch day, make these changes:

    1. Point your subdomain on you internal DNS servers at a CNAME record in this format: schoolname.cms.bbedusites.com.​

In compliance with the WCAG 2.0 Level A guidelines and standards established in 2014, Blackbaud's school website solution has been designed in mind to meet or exceed many of the requirements. The following changes were started in November 2014 to meet and exceed expectations in each of these categories.

Perceivable and Reobust

  • Our HTML structure continues to be reviewed to ensure it is well-formed and will work with assistance technology.

  • Verified our page title of the current page uses the correct heading tag and any visible parent page titles are handled within the structure guidelines.

  • Made sure our content types that rely on <h2> and <h4> also have a valid <h3> with a descriptive label.

  • Even if not styled to be visible, a descriptive label is provided for all widgets within the HTML on a page.

  • For multimedia content, the user has a place to enter a text alternative using caption or title to be provided in the ALT tag for the media.

Understandable

  • To accomplish this standard, the Blackbaud development team works closely with Professional Services to develop a list of best practices for accessibility to inform schools of choices during the design phase.

Operable

This final accessibility category continues to be improved by the Blackbaud team. Currently, the following aspects in Blackbaud's school website solution are still in review:

  • Corrections to our tags for menus for compatibility with WCAG standards.

  • Menu navigation for users who are only able to utilize a keyboard.

  • Basic navigation tags for ARIA to provide short-cuts when using assistance technology.

Blackbaud's school websites are 100% public spaces, so even if you are logged in, you will not be able to see private content from the front end website. Only content that has a security setting set to public will appear on the front end.

As part of your SSL Certificate Service, you are entitled to display the GeoTrust True Site Seal to build consumer confidence in your Web site. This seal is a symbol of site authenticity, security, and trust.

All SSL certificates that Blackbaud uses contain Blackbaud’s organizational unit information because Blackbaud owns, manages, and maintains the certificate. In addition, the site seal will only display for the exact domain listed in your certificate. Additional sites will need their own certificate.

Installation instructions for the GeoTrust True Site Seal is provided by GeoTrust directly, and for additional assistance, please visit the GeoTrust Support Website.

Note: We provide links to third-party websites in an effort to help you resolve your issue. We are not responsible for the information on third-party websites, and we cannot assist with implementing resolutions from these websites.

The background color used in an web page can be changed by a page manager from the Master layout.

Once you know the Master Layout you'd like to change, follow these steps:

  1. From School website, select Website management, edit an existing website, select Master layouts, and select the layout you want to change.

  2. Next, select Styles, then Edit, and finally Body. In here, you'll be able to see which style has been applied to the page.

  3. Armed with that knowledge, select View all master layouts, then Styles.

  4. Once you find that style in the list, edit the body, and then look for Background color.

  5. From here, you can select the color you want and then select Save once you are done.

If you want to give a user access to edit your web site pages, you'll need to give them the page manager role. These users are able to manage all pages for websites, not just specific sites or pages. For something a bit more restrictive, consider the content editor role. These users are only able to edit select content categories, and will not have access to your website.