Displaying a different homepage layout for members and visitors

The people visiting your web site will be coming with different objectives in mind. Someone may be coming to find out about your organisation from a search engine link. Another visitor may know about your organisation already and visits your web site regularly, they may even be a member of your organisation.

For these different ' Audiences' it's useful to display different information, especially on the homepage of your site. You could have a simple layout for first-time visitors to direct them to information about your organisation, your products, or where you meet, and how to contact you for further information.

For a regular visitor it would be useful to display very different information like the latest news and media uploads on the site, forum discussions and upcoming events.

This can be achieved by displaying components in your layout depending on whether the user is logged into the site or not. For example you could show an article component that displays an article that briefly introduces your organisation to the visitors only, so when a user is logged-in, the component disappears, and perhaps displays a different piece of information instead e.g.their next rota/schedule task.
A component can be set to display to a specific audience as follows:

1. Select the edit icon next to the layout or template you wish to modify to open it.
2. Click the edit icon in the top-right corner of the component box that you wish to change the visibility setting for, a pop up window displaying the component settings should display shortly afterwards.
3. Under the 'Component Settings' set the 'visibility' to the required level i.e. non-logged-in visitors only, logged-in account holders only.
4. You can preview your layout for 'guests' or 'logged-in' users only by changing the setting under the 'show' drop-down before clicking the 'Preview' button.
5. Press 'Save' when you're ready to commit your changes.

You can add even extra control to the information that's displayed to members and visitors by selecting the appropriate 'visibility' setting for each piece of content you publish. For more information see 'setting the visibility of content'.