Now your splash images will look good again!

If any part of your site is going to look gorgeous, you want it to be your home page, right? Our homepage template, with its featured splash images, has consistently wowed visitors, and we feel pretty proud of our design. Unfortunately, we’ve discovered that a lot of the images our users want to use aren’t up to spec. This could be for a number of reasons:

• They’ve come from a quick candid camera shot off someone’s cell phone
• You’re using a smaller image from your pre-Collegiate days
• You added text to an image which is now obscured by other elements of the Collegiate template
• You’ve especially created a text banner to showcase a project

A splash banner, courtesy of Central Florida Hillel

We know you want to choose pictures that display the best of your society—ones that showcase your members, your events, and your facilities—but the moment you set them to be featured on Collegiate, they blow way out of proportion and look grainy and awful.

Wait, how’d my splash image get so grainy?!

In the past, we haven’t had a great fix for this, but because we know it’s important to you, we’ve prioritized finding a solution.

How the new home page template works

The ideal size for splash images on Collegiate is 1600px wide by 400px tall. Any time you post an image that is wider than 1200px, Collegiate will fit it to the full width of the splash page area. So if your goal is to have your Collegiate site looking as sharp as possible, try to hit these numbers.

These are your target dimensions for a full-splash image.

In the past, when an image width was smaller than 1200px, our template automatically stretched the image to fill the space, leading to pixelated images. Instead of this, the new template leaves the images unaltered so that they display at their original widths. This results in a smaller, cleaner image, with the natural background of your site extending upwards to fill in the extra space on the sides.

This is how your image will be resized if the width is less than 1200px.

Kick back and enjoy your beautiful home page

If you’re wondering what you need to do to get the template update up and running on your site, the answer is: nothing. We’ve taken this to-do item off your plate by rolling it out across all our current sites, and it will be a built-in feature of our future ones as well.

You don’t have any boxes to check or settings to adjust.

Just relax and enjoy the view.