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An Overview of Site Elements

Your organization’s public website is made up of a few building blocks that work together: pages, page templates, widgets, and themes. Understanding how these fit together makes it much easier to design and maintain your site.

Pages

A page is an individual section of your website, such as Home, Calendar, or Contact Us. Every new site starts with just a Home page — you add more pages as your organization needs them.

Page Templates

Every page is built from a page template — a pre-designed layout suited to a specific purpose (a calendar, a photo gallery, a member directory, and so on). Templates use a modular design made up of widgets that you fill in with your own text, images, and organizational data.

Widgets

A widget is a defined section of a page that combines text, images, and site data. Most widgets can be hidden from public view and have their own editable settings. Some widgets are made up of several widgets arranged side-by-side in the same row — each can be edited on its own, but they can’t be individually hidden without hiding the whole row.

Themes

Your site’s theme controls its overall color scheme, typefaces, placeholder images, and the general modular design of its pages. Background images built into a theme’s widgets display on your site but can’t be edited by your organization.

Production Site and Staging Site

Every organization’s website exists in two versions:

  • Production Site — the live, public-facing version of your website. It starts out invisible (accessible only to administrators) until it’s published for the first time.
  • Staging Site — a separate workspace for testing design changes without affecting your live site. Pages you create in one version don’t automatically exist in the other, with one exception: the Home page always exists in both.

Use the Currently Editing dropdown at the top of the Site Builder window to switch between the two versions. Publishing a Staging Site replaces the entire content of your Production Site.

Previewing and Publishing

  • Preview Page — opens a temporary browser tab showing a live preview of the page you’re working on. The preview disappears once you close that tab.
  • Save and Publish — saves your changes and makes them visible to the public (when editing the Production Site).

Note: Your website remains invisible to the public until it’s been published at least once.