Core Concepts
The column ratio#
The public page is always two columns: the story on one side, the payment box on the other. The column ratio is the one field that decides their proportions and which side is which.
One page, three proportions#
Every public donation page and every public ticket page has the same frame. A trust bar across the top, then two columns — a wide column carrying the hero image, the story, your content blocks and the tabbed well of documents, updates and FAQ, and a narrow rail carrying the payment box. Beneath both, running the full width of the page, the contact band.
What you choose is the proportion:
| Ratio | What it does | Reach for it when |
|---|---|---|
| 60 / 40 | Wide story on the left, payment box on the right. The default. | Almost always. An appeal has to argue its case before it asks, and this gives the argument the room. |
| 50 / 50 | Equal columns, payment box still on the right. | The page's imagery is the argument — a photo-led appeal, or a short story that would look stranded in a 60% column. |
| 40 / 60 | Payment box on the left, wide story on the right. | A returning audience that already knows the cause: a renewal drive, a members' appeal, an event your regulars come back to every year. Putting the ask first suits a reader who does not need convincing. |
That is the whole choice. There is no one-column option and no way to reach one.
Why the ratio and not a layout#
The package used to ship six named layout modes — Spotlight, Split Hero, Summary Sidebar, Conversational, Immersive, Momentum — each a different arrangement of the same page. Six modes meant six places for a donation page to be subtly broken, six places to fix anything, and a real chance that the mode you picked was the one nobody had looked at in months.
They also overlapped with a second field. The design carried a "form side" setting as well as a mode, and the two could contradict each other — a mode that implied a left-hand form beside a setting that said right — with no defined winner. Collapsing both into one three-value field removed the contradiction by construction.
The trade is deliberate: you no longer choose the page's structure, you choose which sections appear on it. That is the more useful control, because it is the one that changes per campaign. A memorial appeal wants the story and nothing else; a disaster response wants documents and a running update timeline; a gala wants the venue and the schedule. See Sections and the contact band.
Where it is set#
The ratio lives on the design record — Settings → Experience Cloud → Page Designs, in the Structure & fonts step of the design drawer. It applies to every campaign using that design, so a design is a house style rather than a one-off page.
A single campaign can differ without needing its own design: set Column ratio on the campaign record itself and it overrides the design's value for that campaign only. Leave it blank — which is the default — and the campaign follows its design.
What it does not control#
The ratio is a proportion, not a theme. Colours, typefaces, corner radius, shadow and spacing are all theme tokens on the design record, and they are independent of the ratio — any of the six packaged designs works at any of the three ratios.
The donate button is always filled
A design used to carry a Button style choice — filled, outlined, or minimal. It no longer does. Every button that setting reached is a primary call to action, so outlined and minimal could only do one thing: hollow out the donate button, dropping it to the same visual weight as the ordinary links on the page, and on two of the packaged designs putting its text below the accessible contrast minimum. It has been removed from the design drawer. To change how the button looks, set Button colour and Button text colour — those still do exactly what they say.
It is also not a mobile setting. Below the two-column breakpoint the page stacks into one column, in
the same order at every ratio: the hero image and campaign name, then the payment box, then the
story and the tabbed well. The 40/60 flip applies to the wide layout only.
That order is deliberate. A phone visitor arriving from a shared link needs the photo and the headline first, to know they are in the right place — a page that opens straight onto a form asks a stranger for money before it has told them what for. But the ask still comes before the story, because a donor who has to scroll past a full appeal to find a form they never saw is a donor who has already left.
Where to go next#
- Sections and the contact band — what appears on the page, per campaign.
- Post campaign updates and documents — filling the tabbed well.
- Campaigns — the campaign record and its design.