Venus Starter Site
Make your website looking best in mobile devices
The Venus and Venus (Full Loaded) Starter Sites are two versions of a mobile-first starter site, based on Bootstrap, the most popular front-end framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web, as well as LESS, the extension to the CSS language that allows you to use variables, mixins, functions and many other techniques in your stylesheets.
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Versions
There are two versions of the "Venus" starter site: "Venus" and "Venus (Full Loaded)". The "Venus" can be regarded as a lightweight version of the "Venus (Full Loaded)" with fewer add-ons pre-installed and used.
The "Venus (Full Loaded)" additionally includes these add-ons:
- Event Calendar
- Extranet
- Newsletter
- Content Versioning
All these packages are commercial and have a 30-day trial period. They are all pre-configured and used across the website.
Features
This website includes, but is not limited to, these features:
- Bootstrap as its frontend development tools
- Mobile first, meaning that is built to look best in the different mobile devices
- LESS for its stylesheets
- Easy skinning
- HTML meta tags generated automatically
- Scripts elements at the bottom, making page content appear faster.
- 5 basic Razor-based templates: "Page", "Page with left aside", "Page with right aside", "Page with navigation", "Frontpage"
- Navigation, search, and other common website features:
- Top menu, rendered by the dedicated Razor function "Composite.Layout.Navigation.MegaMenu"
- Top links, rendered by another dedicated Razor function "Composite.Layout.Navigation.TopLinks"
- Left menu, based on the Composite.Navigation.Distributed add-on
- Language switcher, based on the Composite.Navigation.LanguageSwitcher add-on
- Search, based on the Composite.Search.SimplePageSearch add-on
- Sitemap, based on the Composite.Navigation.Sitemap add-on
- Premium commercial addons to try for 30 days:
- Content Versioning ("Venus - Full Loaded" only)
- Event Calendar ("Venus - Full Loaded" only)
- Extranet ("Venus - Full Loaded" only)
- Form Builder
- Image Crop
- Newsletter ("Venus - Full Loaded" only)
- Profiles component, based on the Composite.Lists.Profiles add-on that allows you to present your team to the visitors to your website
- Page blocks, a number of Razor functions that streamline presentation of typical content on pages, for example, key content, top full-width images, contextual messages etc.
Setup
The Venus starter site comes with a number of pre-installed add-ons. Some of them are working out of the box, but some need configuring before being used.
Some add-ons installed on the Venus starter site (for example, Newsletter, Contact Form or Event Calendar) send emails. You need to ensure that the website is properly configured for this. Please see "Email Host Setup".
Some add-ons needs configuration before you can use them:
- Set up the Extranet add-on to add authorization on your website to access its specific pages and other resources ("Venus - Full Loaded" only).
- Set up the Newsletter add-on to send out newsletters to subscribers ("Venus - Full Loaded" only).
- Add one or more blogs to your website
- Set up the event calendar to have users subscribe to events, webinars etc ("Venus - Full Loaded" only).
Note: If you are using IIS6, please consider configuring .LESS on IIS6 as this Starter site uses .LESS for stylesheets.
Personalization
You can quickly personalize the website by changing its colors (especially the primary brand color), adding your own logo, inserting new page blocks on pages, updating links in the page footer and on the "Contact us" page.
Please see "Personalization" for more information.
Themes
This starter site supports theming. You can: