Community Designer : Points to remember

1. Community Designer in conjunction with community templates for self-service lets you create, brand, and publish a custom community site that looks great on any mobile device
2. Choose from four templates to quickly start your site, and then easily style the pages to match your company’s branding.
3. From Setup, click Communities | All Communities. You can access Community Designer by clicking the Community Designer link(Now manage ?), which was previously named Site.com.
4. If you’re setting up a custom community site for the first time, when you click Community Designer, you can choose from one of four templates to create your site before being brought to Community Designer. (If you don’t want to use the templates, you can skip the template selection to access Site.com directly.)
5. When you access a community site that existed before Winter ’15, you’re brought to Community Designer. However, Community Designer doesn’t support branding for sites that weren’t created by using one of the four templates. Instead, you must use Site.com Studio. To open Site.com Studio, click Go to Site.com Studio in the Communities drop-down.
6. After you’re in Community Designer, you can customize the community template to update your community’s branding and fonts.

7. Navigate (1) to the view that you want to style by clicking links and menu items.
8. Brand the community (2) to match your organization’s style and see your changes immediately appear on the page (1).
9. Use the toolbar (3) to see how your community appears on different devices, access views that aren’t easy to navigate to (such as error and login views), and preview and publish the community.
10. Use the Communities menu (4) to go to Site.com Studio to make advanced customizations to your community pages, open Community Management to manage topics, reputation, and for community dashboards and moderation, and access Community Setup to update community membership, login, and other settings.
11. Community Designer doesn’t support branding for sites that weren’t created by using one of the four available templates.
12. With Community Designer, you can brand only the site’s default home page. To try out a different template, you must set the new page as the site’s home page in Site Configuration in Site.com Studio. But don’t worry—you can always switch back to the original home page.
13. Site.com and the Force.com being the other two, to customize a Salesforce Community.
14. Community Designer (coming Winter ’15):If you need to get a self-service Community up and running fast with few choices to make outside of branding, the Community Designer may be the solution for you. You can apply your branding without writing CSS and use the Site.com Studio to move sections around within a predefined page. The templates are targeted for self-service (case deflection, case submission, etc.) and would not work well as they are today for a Community that incorporates anything beyond support. As the product is in Beta, there are some known limitations and we are expecting this to get more robust in the future and cannot wait to see where this tool goes! Important: The new Community Designer is an excellent replacement for the PKB3 package on the AppExchange.
15. Site.com: Site.com is best used in Communities that have a single type of member and need more customization than the Community Designer offers but do not need to support complex processes or complex, targeted messaging. A 100% Site.com approach tends to work better in Customer Communities than Partner Communities which tend to have many different audiences (ISV,SI, etc.).
16. Force.com: If you need a Community that will support complex business processes, packages from the AppExchange (i.e. a Learning Management System), or multiple audiences with different permissions, we would recommend using classic Force.com for customization. This is where most of our customers find themselves landing currently. Using standard configuration tools as well as Visualforce, you have the ability to easily support multiple audiences and complex business processes inside of a Community. Using this approach also means that you can take advantage of Site.com to create custom pages that are heavy in web content and expose them to Community members through a custom link or tab.
17. More than 2,000 active communities of leading global organizations like British Sky Broadcasting, GE Capital, Honeywell, Key Bank, Pearson, State of Colorado, Tata Communications, are based on the Salesforce Community Cloud platform.
18. The Community Designer (Beta) fills the gap by providing a tool to create visually appealing skins for Salesforce Communities.
19. Communities can now be created quicker than ever with Community Designer. You can create, brand, and publish a custom community that works seamlessly on any device. You can start your self-service community by choosing from four modern design templates that are available, and also manage the styling to match your corporate branding.
20. Community Designer is available in Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions. Enter the main Setup, click Communities- All Communities. Click the Community Designer link now (formerly named as Site.com) to access Community Designer. You can now choose from one of the four custom templates available. You can even skip the choice of the templates to directly enter the Site.com Studio; however you won’t be able to use Community Designer for your customized branding.
21. You can update your community according to your company’s branding and fonts once you have chosen the template by following these steps:

Click on the links and menu items available to navigate the view that you want to style.

Upload your branding images, and change fonts and colours to match. You can see the changes immediately as they appear on the page.

You can now use the toolbar to see how your community appears on different devices, check the views that are difficult to navigate such as error and login views, and finally preview and publish the community.

Now go to the Site.com Studio to make advanced customizations to your community pages. Access Community Management to manage topics, reputation, community analytics and moderation.

Finally, go to Community Setup to customize community membership, login, and other settings.

22. Apart from Site.com and Force.com, Community Designer is the third tool to customize and brand your Salesforce Community. The key benefits of using it are:

• Community Designer templates provide a proven engagement framework
• You can apply your branding without writing CSS
• Even non-technical community managers can easily customize the community
• Community designer accommodates company branding with a consistent customized appearance (like fonts and colours) across all the corporate marketing properties in the community
• The templates are directed for self-service: case deflection, case submission, knowledgebase, etc.

23.  Vanessa Thompson of IDC said, “Any company can benefit from creating an engaged community.”

Customer engagement through Communities has shifted to altogether a new phase with more diversifications and added ease-of-use features. With Community Designer (currently in Beta) as the latest addition in the Salesforce Community Cloud, you get 4 templates:

• Kokua: For Knowledge articles and case submissions
• Koa: For text-based and categorised, optimized for mobile devices
• Napili: For support communities and posting questions
• Aloha: For App Launcher access using single sign-on authentication

24. You need to ask yourself:

• Does your current community include these objects: Ideas, Cases, Knowledgebase and Answers?
• Is your community responsive and needs to be accessed outside salesforce1?
• Does your community need features like gamification, custom objects, full text search, etc.?
• Is your community search engine optimized and easily found on web?

        Nice and effective answer for these questions is Community designer. Use and enjoy :)

* Reference :  Images and content from google.