Styling your pages

Styling your pages

LifeGuide lets you do some basic styling for your intervention pages. If you want to use more advanced styles or graphics, you will need to enlist the help of a graphic designer. Make sure that they work in LifeGuide to create your look to ensure that their designs are compatible with the software.

A note on page length

The page can be as long as you want to make it. The length of a page in LifeGuide is determined by where you position your objects. If you want your page to be longer than the Page Author area you simply have to drag an object further down on the page to as far as you want it to go. This will automatically lengthen the page that is viewed.

However, it is wise to bear in mind your end-user – people do not like to have to keep scrolling down on pages to find the information that they are looking for and it may be preferable to break the pages up into smaller related areas of information.

Setting the overall style of the intervention

The customize style tab which can be found in the intervention.lgil file of the intervention allows you to set style features that will be applied to every page of the intervention.

This page allows you to select:

• the background colour or a background image
• the text style, size and colour for every page of the intervention
• the colours of any links that you include in the intervention
• and the layout of the page including the page width and whether it is positioned to the centre, left or right of the screen

FIGURE 4

Note: Any changes you make to the customise styles options will be overwritten if you then use a template on that page, or change anything on the Page properties or Texbox properties.

Colour

Changing the colour of pages, textboxes or text is easy. If you want to use a standard colour throughout the intervention then use the customize styles tab (see above) or use the options in the properties menu to change the colour of individual objects.

You will need to deselect the Use Global Style box to change the colour of individual objects.

The colour of an object is changed using a colour picker box.

FIGURE 5

1. First pick the colour you would like from the band on the right. 2. Then select the shade by clicking on the shade you would like or dragging the white circle. 3. Your selected shade will show up in the box on the right. Each shade of colour has a unique Hex #. If you want to use the same colour scheme throughout your intervention, you can make a note of the number to type it in the Hex: # box in the future.

If you have a specific colour that you want to use, you can enter the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) values into the colour picker box. To copy a colour from another document, image or website:

• Take a screenshot (press prt sc on your keyboard)
• Paste the screenshot into Microsoft Paint
• Select colour picker icon from the icons on the left-hand side
• Click on the colour you want to copy
• Click on Colours in the top menu, then Edit Colours
• Select Define Custom Colour
• The Red, Green and Blue numbers will show. Put these numbers into the colour picker box in LifeGuide.