Create a virtual tour for your admission pages

A virtual campus tour can be built using a gallery in Resources and a Resource element in Composer, with no special tools required. This article walks through the three steps: gathering and uploading photos, creating a gallery with titles and descriptions, and adding a Resource element to display it.

A virtual tour is a great way to draw prospects to your school website and entice them with beautiful images of your campus and facilities. And it’s easy to create one of these pages using Resources and Composer! This article outlines the steps needed to create a virtual tour gallery for your site.

Step 1: Gather your photos

The most important part of your virtual gallery is a selection of high-quality photographs of your campus and any areas you want to feature. 

You may already have them in Resources, or you may need to begin by uploading them to a Resources folder. Make sure that all of your photos have the same aspect ratio, meaning they are all the same proportions. You can use the Crop tool in the Resource Editor to ensure that they’re all the same size after they’re uploaded.

Step 2: Create a gallery

Once you have decided which pictures to use, collect them all into a gallery. 

We recommend adding titles to each image that indicate the location of the photo, as well as a description that tells something special about each place. Drag and drop to arrange the photos in a logical order, then click Update.

Step 3: Add a Resources element to a page

Next, we’ll add a Resource element to a page to display the gallery, whether it’s a dedicated Virtual Tour page or another page in your Admissions section. Select the gallery that you created in Step 2.

There are a lot of different ways to configure the element and display your virtual tour. You may even want to use two elements. Following are some suggestions for how to set up your Resource element(s):

• Use the Slideshow format, and opt to display the Title and Description on the page under the “All” section. Use the “Controls” section to customize the appearance of the slideshow.

• Set up a two-column format with a Grid-format Resource element showing thumbnails linked to a Single-format Resource element displaying the image with the title and descriptions.

  

• Use the Slideshow format with multiple images per slide, then display the full-size image in a popup.