The OpenWater Blog

Introducing a Full Awards Program Content Management System

If you haven’t read our post on what makes a good awards website take a quick look before reading about our upcoming feature release!

Between now and the end of the month we are rolling out updates to offer full website support within the OpenWater platform. Many organizations use their own website and simply link to the awards entry and judging pages. However, our best practice guidance suggests that you build out an entire microsite for your awards program. Call for entry information, data about the judging panel, and a winners showcase should all be standard elements on your site.

Prior to this release, you may have explored the Custom Pages module. This let you create a flat list of additional pages, but was greatly lacking and required extensive technical knowledge to fully use.

Now, we’ve made it easy to build out your awards website with the following specific improvements:

Menu Builder

You no longer need to contact support to build out a clean navigation for your site!

Our menu builder allows you to create nested pages, generate quick links to your awards entry pages, and to add in shortcuts to pages that may be on a different site.

Banner Size

The banner size is now configurable, and automatically conforms to the size you indicate. You can also override the banner for each page which is especially useful if you are running multiple programs.

Navigation / Login Box Specifications

You can now specify pages that should render the left hand navigation / login box and those pages that need to have the full width.  We also enabled access to editing the text above and below the login box.

All in all we’ve implemented 20 features related to updating and maintaining an awards website.  We are going to continue to make investments in this functionality (e.g. drag and drop page re-ordering and custom templates), but we are excited to get this release out the door at this time.

Kunal Johar

Kunal Johar is the OpenWater platform evangelist. He currently manages our development teams and enjoys diving into the fray. Find him in our community chat room.

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