Move to the New ArcGIS Online Home Page Before the March Update
The ArcGIS Online home page will automatically switch to the new responsive format during the March 2022 ArcGIS Online update. If you haven’t made the change yet, there’s still time.
Your ArcGIS Online home page has been the face of your organization’s spatial online presence for many years. It was with much excitement and fanfare that a new home page was announced in the June 2020 ArcGIS Online update. Included in this update was a new home page editor that included an interactive set of tools you can use to make your home page even better. The new home page has a modern-look and feel, responsive design and preset colour and font themes to incorporate accessible design.
As the new home page came on the scene, many materials were provided to help you light up your organization. This included blog posts on transitioning to the new home page and how to make your home page a must visit destination.
In addition to these helpful resources, the documentation has a series of best practices to follow when creating your home page. Plus, the Extend the Reach of Your GIS eBook complements the documentation with an excellent step-by-step guide for configuring and implementing your organization.
With all these tools in place it’s time to retire the older legacy ArcGIS Online home page. As noted in the Take Action post on the Esri Community, the legacy home pages will automatically be replaced with a default new home page at the ArcGIS Online March 2022 update, or the September 2022 update if you request an extension on the Organization tab.
MAKE THE TRANSITION NOW
To avoid the loss of content and formatting that may exist on your legacy home page make the transition now if you haven’t already. You may be asking yourself; how do I know if I am using the old ArcGIS Online home page still? There’s two quick ways to tell.
1) If you’re an ArcGIS Online administrator, login and go to the Organization tab. You’ll see a notice to remember to switch to the new home page if you haven’t already done so.
Login to your ArcGIS Online organization to see if you need to make the switch to the new home page..
2) If you are not an administrator you can go directly to your home page and see if it looks something like this.
An older ArcGIS Online legacy home page that needs to be updated to the new format.
If it does, you’re using the old home page. Best to get in contact with your ArcGIS Online administrator and share the above resources with them to make the change.
MANY ORGANIZATIONS HAVE ALREADY MADE THE SWITCH
Many of your Canadian contemporaries in the ArcGIS Online world have already made impactful new ArcGIS Online home pages. Here’s a sample to help inspire you to move the new format.
The Yukon Government has a focused home page with direct links to relevant content plus their contact information. Their featured applications are front and centre and consist of easy to use: wildfire, contaminated site information and water data apps that the public can get to quickly. Digging into their galleries, we see that they have marked their content as authoritative (the green check mark). This makes it easier for others to find content that they can trust to be up-to-date. Bonus marks to the geomatics team for establishing their brand with attractive thumbnails.
The Yukon Government uses well branded thumbnails for items on their home page.
The Rideau Valley Conservation Authority (RVCA) catches your attention with a photo of one of their beautiful conservation lands. The responsive design of the new home page allows the image to fill the browser window no matter the window size or device you’re using. I find this page looks nice on my iPhone. I also like how the RVCA has their mission statement on the page to give visitors a clear understanding of the types of resources they’ll find on the page.
The RVCA takes advantage of responsive design to showcase a photo of one of their conservation lands.
Not to be outdone is the City of Kelowna in British Columbia. They have a more compact image of the Okanagan that blends nicely into their primary content. I found myself getting lost in their Storytelling Collection which takes you directly to their Open Kelowna ArcGIS Hub page. Here I discovered many apps that allowed me to learn more about what’s happening in Kelowna and how the City is planning for the future.
As an aside, I like how Kelowna uses an ArcGIS Hub page as another method for sharing their organization’s geospatial information. Cross-linking destinations like an ArcGIS Hub page from an ArcGIS Online home page allows you to quickly present the work that you’ve already done.
The City of Kelowna uses their home page as a launch point to their Storytelling Collection.
So don’t wait any longer! Take advantage of the new ArcGIS home page format now and join the many other organizations who have already made the move.
This post was translated to French and can be viewed here.