Designing Brand Portals

How to design a Brand Portal using Plytix

You may want to create a Brand Portal  for different uses such as displaying a selection of products to customers, or working collaboratively with different teams in your company. Whatever your preferred use for your e-catalog is, designing a Brand Portal in Plytix is simple. This article will walk you through all you can do using the Brand Portal designer in Plytix. 

 

Overview of the Designer

Branding

Product Overview

Product Page

File Overview

 

*Skip to any section in this article by clicking on the links above


Overview of the Designer

To enter the Brand Portal designer: 

  1. Click on "Brand Portals" in the top navigation menu
  2. Click on the name of the portal you want to design (or click on "Add Brand Portal" to create a new one). This will take you to that Brand Portal's details page. 
  3. From here click on "Designer" found on the right

 

When you enter the designer you will see the following sections on the left menu: 

design-options



Branding

The Branding tab is where you'll define settings to make your portal match the rest of you brand. 

Theme color

Here you can a color a theme color to match your brand. The theme color applies to the top banner and some icons.

Header

The header will sit above the top banner. 

Display header - This can be toggled to show or hide your header. By turning this off, title, subtitle, logo and header background will not be displayed on your Brand Portal.

Title - If added, it will sit in the top left of the header section. 

Subtitle - This will sit right below the title.

Text Lines - Add custom text that will appear right below your social media icons to the right-hand side of the header.

Social Networks - Link your social media. Your social networks will be displayed with their social media icons at the top right of the header. 

branding-designer

 

Logo - This will appear in the top left of the header section pushing the header background to the right of it. 

Header Background - This is the image that will appear in the header section on top of your Brand Portal. 

💡 Header display is often turned off when embedding your portal into your own website


To upload images to either your Logo or your Header Background you have two options:

  1. You can upload a new asset from your local device
  2. You can use an existing asset that is already stored in the PIM

upload-logo

 

⚠️  For the best looking outcome we recommend staying within the recommended image size (180x180 px).

 


Product Overview(updated) product-overview

From here you can set how users filter, sort, search for product in your Brand Portal, as well as how they see them in the overview. 

 

Filters

Sorting options

Search bar

Product setup

 

 

Filters

Click on the settings icon next to filters to enter the filter settings. You can also turn filters on/off from here. 

 

ℹ️ Turning filters off means visitors will not be able to filter which products they see. This can make it difficult for them to find a specific set of products within your Brand Portal. 

 

(updated) product-filters

 

Expand/collapse the filters menu - This means you can select if the filters should be shown expanded or collapsed when visitors enter the Brand Portal. Viewers of your portal can always expand/collapse them manually. 

Choose filter attributes. You can choose different attributes to add to your filter menu. For example, filter by product typecategories, size, color, etc. 

ℹ️ You can add up to 10 attributes as filters.

💡 Drag and drop the filters up and down to arrange the order in which they become displayed.

 

Click on an attribute to:

  • Rename your filter title for output 
  • Choose the appearance of your attribute: tree, dropdown, list (see below: options vary based on attribute type).


Filter type Explanation Example
Dropdown The asset options will be shown in a dropdown and viewers can select one option to search by. 

Dropdown filtering

List** Asset options will be shown in a multi-select list. list multi-select filters
Tree In a tree, you can expand a group to show more options. This also allows for multiple selections. category tree

 

ℹ️ Note that list filters work with "OR" logic. This means that when selecting more than one option in a list, the filter will return products that fit any of the selected critera, not products that fit all selected criteria.

 

For example: If filtering for products that are A) waterproof and B) solar-powered, the results may contain products that fit both criteria, but will also contain products that are either waterproof OR solar-powered.

Sorting options 

(updated) custom-sorting

Adding sorting options allows viewers to choose in which order to view the products. For example, by ascending or descending price, name, weight, etc. This will be added  to the top banner of your portal.

 

sorting-page 

ℹ️ You can select up to 5 attributes to sort by.

Search bar

If you choose to activate the search bar, you can select up to 2 attributes visitors can search your portal by (e.g. name and product ID). 

 

product-search

The help text you edit will show up in your Brand Portal's search bar:

search-bar-backpack

💡 Keep "help text" to 22 characters to ensure it's not cut off. 

 

Product setup

Group variations with parent - This will define how visitors see products with variations: grouped with the parent product or displayed separately. 

product-overview_group-variations

See below an example of how grouped variations would be displayed compared to ungrouped variations:

grouped-variations

ungrouped-variations

Grid size - Select the size of products in grid view. 

 

⚠️ Grid can affect how many products visitors see per line.

 

Product title - Choose which attribute to use for your product title (the text that is shown below the product thumbnail). 

 

ℹ️  Product title is limited to short-text attributes. 

 

Product thumbnail - Here you can select what media attribute you want to use as the featured product image. Let the system take the first image of the product gallery and make it your overview thumbnail, or select a specific image attribute to use. 

Featured attributes - You can choose up to 5 additional attributes to include beneath the thumbnail of each product. 

(updated) grid-size


Product page

The product page is what visitors see when they click on a product.  In this sections you define which attributes to show, and how they should be organized. From here you can also choose which image attribute to use for your product gallery. 

 

Autofill activated

Autofill deactivated

Autofill activated

 

product-page

 

When autofill is switched on, the system will show all attributes loaded in the Brand Portal settings. You can then choose if you want to organize these attributes by attribute groups or not. When organizing attributes by group, the attributes will be in the same order as shown in the attribute groups settings. If you choose to not organize attributes by group, attributes will be displayed in alphabetical order of the output label. 

 

⚠️  The ordering of attributes is case sensitive meaning all attributes that are capitalized will show first.

 

Autofill deactivated

When autofill is switched off, you can customize which attributes to show, and drag and drop them in the order you want. Attributes are divided into featured attributes and components

 

Featured attributes are displayed in the product header, next to the gallery. 

⚠️ HTML type attributes cannot be displayed in the featured attributes area.


Components
are sections added below the product header. You can name these sections however you want and they can include attributes, galleries, variations, and relationships. Each component has its own additional settings, and you can drag and drop these components in whatever order you'd like. 

(updated) product-page-autofill_off

Attributes component
  • Can be shown in 2 columns or in table
  • Add attributes and click and drag them to customize the order shown
Gallery component
  • Display in a grid or list
  • Define how to display the asset (as a thumbnail, filename, or both)
  • Select the attribute
You will need to add an asset component for each asset attribute you want to include in your Brand Portal.
Variations component
  • Choose a product title attribute to identify the variant product
  • Select the thumbnail attribute for the variations
  • Select up to 4 attributes to show alongside the product 
  • Choose how to display the products: in a grid or list
  • You can only select one Variations component at a time
Relationships component
  • Select the relationship attribute (This cannot be changed later)
  • Choose a product title attribute
  • Select which attribute to use as a thumbnail
  • Select up to 4 attributes to show alongside the product 
  • Choose how to display the products: in a grid or list

 

 


File Overview

For assets to appear here, you must first add them to the Assets tab of the Brand Portal settings. Like in the product overview section of the designer, the file overview section gives you the option to allow visitors to filter, sort, and search through your assets. This is also where you can select the default grid size. 

 

Filters

Sorting 

Search bar

 

Filters

Turning on filters allows visitors to filter through assets. This can help them find what they are looking for, faster. To do this, add the "category" filter attribute. Click on it to expand the settings options. 

Now you can 

  • Rename the label
  • Define how to display it (as a tree, or dropdown), and
  • Set which level to begin the filter tree from. 

file-filters

ℹ️ Unlike product filters, you can only filter files by categories in your Brand Portal.

Sorting

In the sorting section you can decide how your assets should be sorted. 

 

If sorting is switched "off", you can set the default way to sort assets. 

  • Choose if you want to sort by filename, last modification date, or created date
  • Choose if you want it to be in ascending or descending order

file-sorting

 

If sorting is switched "on" it means visitors can choose how they want to sort assets. 

  • You can select which attribute options to include (created date, filename, last modification date)
  • You can rename the label (in the example below we've renamed "Last modified" date to "Updated on"

file-sorting-sorting_on

Search bar

Naturally, turning the search bar on gives visitors the option to search for a specific asset or groups of asset by its name. To do this, toggle the search bar option on.

 

 


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