Getting started
You picked a design — now make it yours
Every design arrives finished — with pages, headings, photographs and a made-up business in it. That business is not yours. Replacing it is the whole job, and it takes about twenty minutes.
Opening the editor
From your site, press Edit site. If you have just created the site from a design, the editor opens on its own.
The editor is three columns:
- Left — your pages, and the blocks that make up the page you are on. A block is one stripe of the page: a heading, a row of photographs, a price list, a contact form.
- Middle — the page itself. Click any words on it and type.
- Right — settings for whatever you have selected: the picture, the colours, the link a button goes to.
Change the words
Click straight onto the words in the middle column and type. That is the whole mechanism — there is no separate form to fill in and no Save button.
Work through the home page top to bottom first. The sample business name usually appears three or four times: in the header, the big heading, the footer, and often a page title.
Change the pictures
Click a picture, then Replace image in the right-hand column. You can upload your own, choose one from our library, or paste the address of a picture that is already online.
- PNG, JPG, WebP and GIF.
- The editor shrinks large photographs for you before they are uploaded, so a picture straight off a phone is fine.
- 4 MB each after that, and up to 200 pictures per site.
See Pictures, and a site that feels slow if things look blurry or load slowly.
Check it before you publish
Press Publish and the editor reads the whole site first, under Before you publish. It looks for the things that embarrass a new site:
- "Still says what the sample said" — words that are still the design's, not yours. This is the one to clear.
- Links that go nowhere.
- Photos nobody has described — the text a blind visitor and a search engine read instead of the picture.
- Pages with no description, headings out of order, and pages that will be slow to load.
None of it stops you publishing. It is a second pair of eyes, not a gate.
Show somebody before it is live
In the publish panel you can create a share link — a private, expiring address for the version you are working on. Send it to whoever has opinions. They see the draft; the public does not.
Nothing you do here is public yet
Editing changes a draft. Your live site does not move until you press Publish. If the site has never been published, nobody can see any of it.
Want a different starting point, or a second site? Browse the designs.