General Views, is a feature available for all our websites. It enables you to create items (e.g. news articles, products, events etc.), optionally group them into categories and assign them to your website menu. 

In case you want to categorise general views items into groups you need to create categories. Note that there is no limit to the depth of category levels; therefore you can create as many categories or subcategories as you want and assign as many items as you want into each one.

In the Categories tab, an overview of all general views categories is available. You can easily publish or unpublish them, rearrange their order using "drag & drop", copy, delete, edit or create new ones.

Once within a General Views category, you can edit its name and alias (make sure each one is unique), publish or unpublish it, assign it to others or set it as root (parent category). Moreover, you can define its metadata tags; name, description, keywords & robots. Setting different metadata tags for different languages, in case you have activated more than one in your plan, is also available.

What is more, you can set a teaser image, up to 8 MB, for each category and set its dimensions. We recommend against setting pictures with big dimensions as teasers since the loading speed of your website might be affected. What is more, the predefined teaser images dimensions cannot be surpassed no matter how big is the image you upload.

Lastly, you can view the RSS Links for each category in all the available languages. RSS Feeds with "All", will display all items in this category whereas "Featured", will display only the items marked as featured. You may then incorporate them into your social media, syndicate them, share them with your audience or submit them to RSS directories.

Once categories are created you can assign general views items to them.

In the Items tab, an overview of all items is available. You can easily publish or unpublish them, rearrange their display order using the Order Priority column (the bigger the order display number the latter they will displayed in your website), copy, delete, edit or create new ones. Moreover, you can quickly specify Featured & Searchable items in the relevant columns. Featured items will be highlighted in your Homepage while Searchable items will be accessible through the website's search bar.

Each General Views item has its own title, short & long description, alias (make sure each one is unique), image and can be assigned to one or multiple categories. Text editors are equipped with numerous tools allowing you to create compelling and rich content. What is more, you can switch to HTML editor at any time, in order to insert custom code. Again, in case you have added extra languages to your plan, you can specify values for each one.

Moreover, Forms (custom or premade), Media Galleries, Authors, related items and a Google Maps location can be assigned to each general views item.

In case the item is describing, for example, an event or a concert, specific dates and hours can be set. By doing so, the item will be displayed on the homepage's calendar, during the selected dates.

Looksomething utilises the Disqus comment platform on all its websites. Disqus is a worldwide comment hosting service for websites that helps power online discussions and increase engagement.

Visiting each item individually you can turn comments on or off. You can connect your Disqus account to your website by visiting Settings from where you may also activate or deactivate comments for all the website's items.

Push notification

If Web Push Notification Addon is active in your plan you can send this specific item as push notification message to your website's visitors leading them directly to it. Title, short description, image (only on Google Chrome browsers) and the item's URL will be used in the notification message. As soon as you are done editing the item simply press Save and Send Push.

Slider URL

Each General Views Item can be assigned to your slider (by visiting Settings).
In case Slider URL is left blank then visitors clicking on a slider's item will be redirected to that item. However, if a URL is set here, then users will be redirected to this one instead. Make sure you type http:// or https:// at the beginning of the URL.

Social Bookmarks

Here, you can enable or disable social bookmarks; buttons that allow users to share the producer to social media or add it to their bookmarks.

Metadata Tags

Moreover, you can define each item's metadata tags; title, description, keywords & robots. Metadata tags are keywords and phrases that describe the contents of the page allowing search engines e.g. Google to understand what each page portrays. In case you have added more languages to your plan then different metadata tags can be set for different languages. Feel free to learn more about metadata tags in our relevant article.

You may now visit Website Menu in order to assign categories directly to menus.

The following video tutorial demonstrates how you can create and edit general views items and categories using your Control Panel.

Please note that some of the features and options displayed in this video might not be available or active in your plan.

If you have questions while watching, just ask us using the messenger in the lower right corner of this page and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.