Content 101

Looking for an overview of how to create and manage content in Fugo? You've come to the right place.

Sarah avatar
Written by Sarah
Updated over a week ago

Table of Contents:

Content Types

Publishing Content

When it comes to digital signage, there’s definitely a lot to think about. First, what hardware do you need? Second, you need to get it installed physically, set up, and ready to go. Then, you need to pick which software you’ll use to power it (obviously, we’re a little biased on this one).

But the fourth decision is arguably the most important one; what content do you display? Digital signage offers you so much more flexibility than older, more static alternatives like chalkboard signs or paper menus, but what works best? If you use your screens right and create engaging content, your brand can really stick in your customers’ minds — not to mention provide you with a great ROI.

Thankfully, a good content management solution can make it easy, quick, and simple to create impactful and effective content for your digital signage, enabling you to get the most out of your investment.

In the guide below, we’ll show you all of the kinds of content you can display on your screens using Fugo, how you can display that content, and all of the settings that come along with each different type. We’ll also be looking at the Design Studio, a unique feature inside Fugo that makes it simple to create complex, eye-catching layouts, designs, graphics, digital posters — all kinds of fun stuff!

So - let’s get into it, starting with:

The types of content you can publish with Fugo

1) Media

More than just a way to zhuzh up your information, including media like pictures or videos with the displays you put on your digital signage is a crucial way to engage viewers with your information. For instance, including images of food on your menu boards can be a really powerful way to catch eyes and drive sales.

Even better, digital signage has a couple of key advantages over traditional static signage or displays in this area:

  1. Images can take up a lot of room in a content area. With digital signage, you can rotate through different displays, giving you the opportunity to display more images in the same space by changing what is displayed.

  2. Video content is not achievable with paper displays, but it is with digital signage. Moving, dynamic video content is even better at catching the eye of potential customers than images are.

Filetypes Supported

We support a variety of filetypes:

  • JPEG

  • JPEG2000

  • PNG

  • MPG

  • MPEG

  • MOV

  • MP4

  • AVI

  • SVG

Organizing your Media with the Media Library

If your account has multiple spaces, each space has its own Media Library, that only members of that space can access. This means you can upload all the media you need to each space, without worrying about people accessing media that they’re not supposed to, or struggling to find the media they need in a big, bloated media library.

When you’re dealing with a lot of different files within your space, it can be handy to organize them into folders within the Fugo Media Library. Thankfully, this is pretty simple!

To create a new folder, you just need to head to your Media Library by clicking Media in the top bar, and then select New and New Folder.

From there, it’s as easy as dragging and dropping media into your new folder, or entering your new folder and uploading media directly into it. Easy-peasy!

Publishing Media

There are a few ways to publish your media files.

You can publish directly from the Media Library by clicking the three-dot menu to the right of the filename and clicking Publish:

Which will open up the “Publish” popup, allowing you to publish to a screen, a channel, or add your media to a playlist:

You can also add your media in to your Design Studio content - which is something we’ll cover a little later in Section 4 - Design Studio Content.

2) Apps

Apps are a fantastic way to pull in live information from all kinds of different services that you’re already using, all over the web. You can also easily display content from services you might not already be using, such as weather information. This can be useful to put on your workplace TV screens, for instance.

You can pull in social feeds to display the latest tweets from your account or the latest posts on a particular hashtag, and display a QR code alongside the feed to allow people to easily scan and follow your account or make a post that appears on the feed - handy for events and conventions!

Some of our most popular Apps include the World Weather and Clock, Digital Menus, QR codes, and RSS feeds for displaying live updates.

You can publish Apps to screen in a couple of ways. For the quickest direct-to-screen solution, simply head over to the “Apps” page in the top navigation, and then click “Try App”.

The “Publish” popup will open, allowing you to publish directly to screens or channels (after some app-specific configuration such as logging in or setting your location), or add your app to Playlists.

You can also add Apps to any content you’re putting together in the Design Studio, but we’ll cover that a little further down in the Design Studio Content section.

3) Dashboards

Integrating and displaying dashboards with your digital signage is a seriously helpful way to keep your teams informed about how they’re performing. Displaying business intelligence and analytical dashboards on your workplace tv screens can give you and your staff good insight into all kinds of things. For instance, you can monitor what your marketing ROI is, and how well certain channels perform over others. If you’re running email campaigns, you can keep track of their performance, and gain a better understanding of where to focus your efforts.

We offer integrations with all kinds of third-party dashboard platforms, including Power BI, Kibana (Elastic Search), DataDog, Tableau, Klipfolio, Looker, Google Data Studio, Grafana, Splunk, Trello, and Geckoboard.

💁‍♀️ Note: If you're not sure whether or not we support your preferred dashboard service, just ask! support@fugo.ai  

You can display a dashboard on your digital signage in a couple of ways. The easiest and quickest way to display a dashboard is by heading to the Dashboards page in the top navigation, and selecting a dashboard:

From here, you can publish by clicking the Publish button in the bottom right. This will open the “Publish” popup, allowing you to publish to screen or into a channel or add your Dashboard to a playlist.

You can also add your Dashboard to any Design Studio content that you’re working on, which we’ll cover in the next section below.

4) Design Studio Content

Unique to Fugo, the Design Studio is a powerful tool that allows anybody to put together complex layouts, and engaging & interesting content, without having to study or pay for specialist design software or tools. You can easily build and create digital posters and graphics in the Design Studio, and publish them all directly from within the studio.

And, with the Design Studio, you don’t need to worry about difficult or time-intensive changes every time you need to update your content. You, or anybody on your staff, can simply log in and make the updates that you need without having to download, update and re-upload assets or pay a design agency to do it for you.

So, how do you get started with the Design Studio? Well, we’d recommend using some of our high-quality templates to get a head start on creating your content.

Templates

You can find our wide variety of templates from the Templates page in the top navigation. These cover a variety of industries and specific use-cases, so we’re certain you’ll find a good starting point for your content here.

You can search and filter for specific templates to help you get started.

Some of our most popular templates at the moment include:

As with all of our other templates, these are fully and easily customizable to allow you to match them to your needs and brand.

To open a template and get started editing, you simply need to click on the one you want to use.

If you find that we don’t have the perfect template for you, you can request templates through our template request form.

Creating Content

The Design Studio allows for easy and neat content layout creation by allowing to designate “zones” to display content in. This means you can avoid having untidy edges or unintended overlaps, meaning your content is always reliably displayed the way you intend it to.

You can do this by simply dragging content in, and then resizing it using the handles available to you:

Content carousels are another great way to make use of the space available to you on your digital signage, by allowing you to rotate what is displayed in each zone of your layouts. This includes allowing you to cycle through apps, text, media, or even dashboards. You can set the time that each “slide” shows for, giving you full control over how your content is displayed.

You can set up a carousel by simply dragging content on top of other content. You’ll see a tile with a plus symbol, indicating that a carousel can be created. Dropping your content into that tile will automatically create a carousel and allow you to access settings. You can re-order the slides of the carousel, and adjust timings and animations.

We’ve worked to eliminate the guesswork that publishing to digital signage sometimes entails, by allowing you to simply select your display resolution from the top bar to preview exactly what your content will look like when it reaches your digital signage.

To alter your design canvas to match your screen resolution, simply click the Page Resolution dropdown in the top bar, which will open the resolution popup and give you a choice of common resolutions to pick from, as well as allow for custom sizes to be put in.

You can also use the orientation tools at the top, in case you have a portrait display instead of a landscape one.

On the right-hand side, you’ll see the Slides tab. You can add as many slides as you’d like to your Design Studio project, and set timings for them to cycle through. These operate similarly to a content carousel, meaning you can vary your content on the same digital signage display.

Add a slide using the Add Slide button at the top of this panel, or by simply clicking a new template in the Templates tab on the left-hand side.

The Design Studio provides easy access to Apps, Dashboards, and items from the Media Library. Simply use the left-hand pane to select the tab you’re looking for, and then use our filtering or searching tools to find the piece of content you want to add. When you’ve found it, just drag it onto your canvas, and you’re all set!

The Design Studio has some particularly useful integrations that are offered free of charge to users, including Unsplash, Pexels, and Giphy. This means you’ll never have to go without excellent, high-quality stock imagery to use as backdrops or as part of your content, and can keep your audience entertained with GIFs from Giphy. These work similarly to the stickers that we offer, small pieces of bright and colorful content to add a splash of life to your slides.

We also offer a variety of fonts so that you can match your text content to your brand, and special texts to allow for dynamic ways to display your text so that you can spice it up a little to keep it more engaging. This is especially useful for headings.

You can also present your images in a more interesting way by using the Frames that we offer. These are a collection of shapes that you can drag images over to display them within.

Publishing Content

1) How to Publish Content

Once you’ve finished working on your content in the Design Studio, have uploaded the media you need to display, or have finished integrating the Apps and Dashboards you want to display, you need to display it!

2) Where can you publish content?

You can publish content to Screens or Channels. Screens are physical bits of digital signage, and Channels are virtual screens that are set up through the Fugo browser extension. This means you can use your computer as a screen, or any other device that can run the Fugo browser extension.

3) How to publish using Playlists

To publish using playlists, you simply need to add your content into an existing Playlist, or create a new Playlist. You can do that by creating a Playlist from the Playlist page in the top navigation:

This allows you to select Screens or Channels to display the Playlist on. Using the Content tab, you can select specific Media, Apps, or Dashboards. You can also select Design Studio content, which will allow you to display any project you’ve been working on, on your Screens and Channels.

It also gives you control over when you display content, allowing you to create and set up a schedule.

4) How to stop displaying content

When you build a playlist, you have the option to schedule and set an end date for your playlist. When you send an end date, Fugo will stop running that playlist according to your set date.

If you need to stop displaying a playlist, there are a few ways to go about it:

Scheduled

When creating your Playlist in the first place, you will have the option to include an end date. Once this date is reached, your Playlist will finish and no longer display on your Screens or Channels.

Pausing or Removing a Playlist

If you need to stop displaying a Playlist immediately, or if you haven’t set an end date via the schedule and now need to remove a Playlist, you can pause or remove Playlists from two places. If you visit the Playlists page, you can select Pause, or click the three-dot menu and click Remove to delete the Playlist entirely.

You can also remove the Playlist from a Screen or Channel directly. To do this, simply head to the Screens or Channels page, select the Screen or Channel that it’s appearing on, and then remove it from within that page.

Need Help?

Have any questions you still need answered regarding creating & publishing content with Fugo? Do you have feedback you want to share with our team? Email us at support@fugo.ai

Happy publishing!

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