Create Specialized Sidebar Templates

After you create your primary sidebar template, you may find it advantageous to create additional sidebar templates for specific purposes. For example, suppose your module pattern will contain three pages—an introduction, a page with a lecture video and slides or notes, and a final summary—and that the content for each of these page types includes some repeated content (standard section headings, snippets of boilerplate text, etc.). Rather than using the primary template for all three pages in the module pattern, you could create a separate template, already populated with standard section headings and boilerplate text, for each.

Specialized templates are also useful for storing page layouts that you want to reuse in your course. The content component pages in the  [New] DesignPLUS User Guide  are a great example. Every content component page is organized into four identically named sections with page navigation provided by the vertical pill tab element. The content for the Overview section uses a three-column layout, and the other three sections use a single-column format with expanders. Recreating this layout for every component page would have undoubtedly been an overwhelming task, even for advanced DesignPLUS users. By saving the page as a template, the intricate layout and repeated content need only be created once.

You don't have to create all of your templates before you start building your course. In fact, you may only realize you need a template when you are in the middle of building your course.