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School-level feature — managed within your school portal at yourschool.deandesk.com. Use the school Admin Dashboard, not the institution dashboard.
Help families recognize your school and confirm the details they will rely on. Where to go: Operations → School Configuration → General, then Website & Comms → Website → Design.

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Video walkthrough

Download the video
This walkthrough is a human-recorded tutorial in the Northstar Academy demo school, with English captions. Use the CC control to turn captions on or off. Changes shown in the recording apply to the demo school.

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Follow along

1

Open the school details

From School setup, select School identity and branding, then Open School Configuration. You can also open Operations → School Configuration in the admin sidebar.
2

Review General

Check School Name, Description, Tagline, School Website, timezone and address fields. Use the details for this school, rather than its parent institution. Sales Currency is read-only: it was chosen when the school was created. Review Hostname and any custom domain carefully before changing them. In Email Settings, enter a Default reply-to email if replies to school emails should go to a shared inbox; see Setting a school-wide reply-to address.
3

Save editable details

Click Save Changes. Wait for the success message, then reload to confirm the saved values. Some fields also have their own save action; do not assume every unsaved edit has been applied.
4

Add your school’s look

Open Website & Comms → Website, then Design. Review your logo, colors and page typography. Save pending changes before switching tabs. For public header and footer links, use Site Navigation; signed-in menu choices belong in App Menus.
5

Review the result

Preview the school on desktop and mobile. Return to School setup, select this step, click Refresh checks, then check I reviewed school identity and branding once the details and appearance are correct.
School Configuration and Website are separate tools. A logo upload does not save unrelated school details. Do not change a working hostname just to complete this checklist.

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Video transcript

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0:00 — Introduction

Hello and welcome to a tutorial on how to get your school set up for DeanDesk. We’ve made the experience very easy for you to set up your school for the first time and get your school ready to accept new students, new customers, or new members for your organization. So the first thing that we want to do is make the school yours, which means to add any type of individual unique identifiers or branding to your school to make it look like your own. So the first thing that you’re going to do is start from the school identity, which is step one. What you’re going to see over here is a page where you can look at the school configuration. And below that, you’ll also be able to read the guide or watch the video walkthrough as well to help you through this process.

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0:59 — Where to find the two tools

The school identity step and the branding step requires two separate websites, two separate pages on the website. Excuse me. So the first page is going to be in the operations tab where you look at school configuration. After that, we will go to the website tab and go to the design part of the website tab and we will input that information. So let’s begin by going to school configuration. So you click on school configuration either from here or you can also go to operations and click on school configuration from here. So that will be the first step before we come back to our guide. So I’m going to open school configuration

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1:45 — School details, hosting and contact information

and over here in this information, you’re going to see some basic information related to your school, such as your school name, the description for your school and the tagline for your school as well. A description is a longer description for what your school or your organization is and your tagline is a shorter description for your school. One thing I should mention is even though I’ve been saying school, this can be applied to any type of organization, whether you have students or not. So even if you don’t have students but you have members, the same information is going to apply. Below here, you’ll have hosting which you can change and this is going to be your blank.DeanDesk.com website. So for example, this one will be localhost.DeanDesk.com. You can also request a custom domain and we can actually help you set up a custom domain through the DeanDesk support team. So if you have a custom domain name that you have bought from an external provider like GoDaddy or Squarespace or Bluehost or Hostinger, then we can help you set that up so that your DeanDesk website actually points to that custom domain name. So you can open up a ticket with support and we’ll get back to you with information on how to set that up. Your school website is an optional field and that’s going to be relevant if you have an existing website that you use for marketing reasons. So that’s your school’s main website. You can also adjust your school’s time zone as well, although every student will see the course information and the schedule from the calendar of the school’s academic calendar or the organization’s calendar in their own time zone. You also can change the address information so you can add your address over here as well. So there’s other information in the school configuration

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3:56 — Choose a dashboard style

which we’ll leave for another time, such as features, such as attendance tracking, academic terminology, disciplinary records, volunteer hours, and the dashboard setting. Out of all of these, the relevant one for setting up your school is what kind of dashboard style do you want. The default dashboard is good for most intents and purposes, but if you have a more social type of organization, such as a membership club or a community that doesn’t really need a fully fledged dashboard, you might opt in for the social dashboard. Or if you want an even simpler experience, such as just a donation page for your organization, then you can even just use a profile page. What that means is that when logged in users log into your DeanDesk platform, what is going to be the page that they land on? So the default dashboard is for fully fledged schools. The social dashboard is for more stripped down communities, such as gyms or other membership organizations, such as a Pilates studio or something to that effect, while a profile page is for an even simpler experience.

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5:15 — Logo, favicon, themes and colors

So once we have completed this, then let’s continue our setup. So let’s go back to school identity and branding. And here, the next step is to open up the website. So the website page, which is also accessible from the left side over here, website over here, is going to relate to the look and feel and the logo and the school colors. So if you click on a website over here, you’re going to see a lot of different links in the tabs up here. And the one that we’re concerned with right now is the design page. We’ll come back to the other ones in another video. So from here, you can control the look and feel of your organization. So if you have a logo, you can a logo from here. So you can either select something that’s already in your image library, or you can upload a new logo from here. You can also change the size of your logo. And you can change the type of logo that you have, whether you want it to be rounded, or you want it to have corners. You can also change the favicon, which is going to be the little icon that’s shown on the browser tab. Or you could leave it as the default DeanDesk favicon. You also have the ability of changing the overall theme of your website as well. So I can go from a default theme to a classic theme, or a modern theme. When I press save changes, the site will reload and you’ll be able to see these new changes reflected. So as you can see, now that I’ve changed certain things such as logo size, and the logo corners to being square, and you can also see that the font has also changed as well. So I’m going to go back and change it back to the default and continue. So from here, you can also change your primary color, your footer color, and your header color. So your header color is this color up here, and your footer color is going to be at the bottom of the page. And this is a preview of what that will look like. You also have text colors and link colors as well, which will also be important when you’re creating your site header. For more advanced organizations, you can also have advanced themes as well, and add custom CSS, and even upload custom fonts as well. That will completely change the look and feel and really make your website look like your own. So we also have additional customizations as well, such as being able to change the header and the footer, and adding custom links from here as well. You can also have additional settings, such as hiding the register option, and this is managed by your enrollment method in your onboarding policies, which we’ll talk about at a different time. But generally speaking, you can add any link that you want from here. So a link is any type of link that you want to appear at the top of the website. So for example, I can add a built-in page such as the products page. And when I save changes over here, it’s giving me an error because I need to have a label that I add over here. When I hit save changes, as you can see, now it reflects up here in product. So I’m going to go ahead and delete that because we don’t need it, and save my changes again. And from here, in the same way, you can also add footer links as well. The last thing is the homepage. So we have a default homepage, but you can also change the homepage as well to be a custom page from here. And we’ll talk more about how to create a custom page and the various customizations that you can have in another video, but that’s basically how you are going to control how the website looks.

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9:16 — Review the checklist

So now let’s go back, let’s discard all of our changes, and let’s go back where we were previously, which is our school identity and our branding. So once you have done that and you’ve reviewed your school identity and your branding, then you can check this off and you can refresh your checks to make sure that you didn’t miss anything. So that concludes our first step for school identity and branding, and that brings us to the second step, which is enrollment and admissions, which is where you decide how people join the program and what they need to complete.

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More help

Back to the school setup guide.